Golden Days

I

DURING these melancholy days of frustration, of almsgiving and abstinence, it is well to survey our predicament, to marshal up the forces that may win back the lost battles, to post a lookout for the couriers bringing tidings of deliverance from our bondage. It will be no frivolous inquiry. Levity shall have no place in our councils. Let us, after the manner of the American ritual, get ‘all tied up’ in conference and proceed to the serious business of the day.

It is instinctive, I suppose, when one finds himself in a fix, to contrast his plight with previous episodes of a perilous sort. Fiscal history is replete with panics: ’37, ’57, ’73, ’93, ’03, ’07, ’21, are dates of reckoning prior to the current crisis. I am unfamiliar with all save the last of these seven atonements.

Returning, in 1919, from a brief career in the profession of arms, — an adventure I look back upon as something of a military miscarriage, — I found the country knee-deep in a manifestation masquerading as a ‘boom,’ but, compared with the pyrotechnics of a few years later, it was hardly more than a squib. You recall the fashionable playthings of the period: Bethlehem and Baldwin, Crucible and Stutz, Woolen and Mexican Pete. Shipping, shoes and sugar, fertilizer, rubber and oil, motors, textiles and steels, were the tinder of the post-war display. Then, of a sudden, raw-material prices collapsed, corporate shelves groaned under the weight of prodigious inventories, and tribulation was at hand.

They were grievous times — but not the prostration nor quite the dire forebodings that have currently beset us. Corporations bailed themselves out with bond issues at 7 or 8 per cent; we extended mammoth credits to Europe with the hope that much of the money would come home to roost; Liberty Loans declined very close to a 6 per cent basis when the Secretary of the Treasury, in one of the very few official predictions of corner-turning, permitted himself the extravagance of proclaiming them ‘nothing less than a wonderful buy’; the railways were granted rate increases in a big way; American Telephone confounded the pessimists by raising its eight-dollar dividend to nine; labor, which had been making considerable fuss, took a more conciliatory attitude, and by the close of ’21 things were on the mend.

The abundance of the next ten years clearly had its inception in the urgent need for replenishment of automobiles, and in construction and equipment (railroad, farm, electrical), wherein necessitous cessation in favor of war works had built up a voluminous peace-time demand. Upon this broad base, recuperation went forward slowly but decisively; and progress was presently to be hastened amazingly by the introduction and eager reception of dreams which had become practical realities — radio, rayon, refrigeration; aviation, talkies, installment buying, philanthropy. It is important to mention philanthropy, since competent authority now ranks it eighth in the scale of American industries and computes its annual disbursements at two and a half billion dollars.

A full century of advancement was crowded into that brief, uncanny span. It would be asking a good deal of another cycle to produce a comparable catalogue of tricks. New-found handmaidens constantly attend us. Our own home has become a masterpiece of efficiency, regulated to an incredible nicety — which accounts, I suppose, for the fact that our meals are always on time and only one of the children is left-handed! A dozen electric motors draw day and night upon Mr. Insull’s ample reservoir of kilowatts, performing all manner of more or less essential services. What scenes of confusion, were anything to interrupt this vital flow! We could probably carry on to the point of boiling an egg, but beyond that I would not fancy the domestic regimen reduced to a non-mechanical basis.

The other day the mail brought announcements of a rotary toothbrush, self-propelled, eliminating one of the last surviving forearm motions; and a bedroom window closer, timed to operate at an appointed hour, guaranteeing a cosy boudoir at no personal discomfort. Despite these ingenious timesavers, however, there still remains the ironic rush to catch the 7.49.

II

Those who scan the heavens with an honesty of purpose report credible evidence that the economic skies are clearing. The rift is described as being no larger than a baby’s hand, but the cloud that foreshadowed the depression has since been referred to as of the same Lilliputian proportions. Our stubborn, rear-guard action against the forces of deflation and disillusionment has been a Pyrrhic resistance. The politicians are the last to yield, — if indeed they mean to yield at all, — despite their profligate handiwork. Industry and trade, save for a few inspiring exceptions, still are prostrate; but the background is said to be less ominous.

If we have not yet reached the acquisitive stage, we at least are taking more of an interest in things. Consternation has seized the hoarders

— lest they be unable to remember where they hid their gold. The public, impoverished in body and soul, but still immersed, at least sentimentally, in the financial page, is thumbing the slightly damaged ‘bargains.’

It has, withal, been a colorless despondency : no catchwords to remember it by, no celluloid buttons with feverish slogans, hardly an honest-to-goodness fakir, and only nine new breakfast foods. It is high time something sprightly was afoot.

But we should not be carried away by such pallid portents as may be visible; rather let us search the more diligently for substantial tokens of a happier lot. The bulwarks of the postwar recovery do not loom so large in to-day’s prospectus. Obsolescence, a profusion of cylinders, and a lenient banker may combine to quicken motorcar production; but the railroads did themselves proud in the recent heydays and now need not so much new rolling stock as something to start the rolling stock rolling. The utilities are, for the present, pretty well super-powered. The farmer has been sold a machine for everything except making money. Apartment buildings — and for that matter the things that go into them — have far outstripped our hesitant procreation. Where, then, shall we look for some impetus that will ‘blow the lid off’?

Only change is changeless: ‘Each American generation has evolved its own ethics, mechanics, chemics, economics, and æsthetics only to see these painful principles brushed aside as curiosities by its children . . . each generation deliberately slays itself with its own inventions and discoveries.’

Disarmament, thrift in government, death to graft and waste, a comprehensive building programme for decent tenements, conservation of natural resources without resort to the ghastly alternative of willful destruction, would contribute immeasurably to a brighter prospect.

Television, energy from the sun and sea, air conditioning, temperature control, aluminum, gas — developments such as these may also swell the jack pot of another day.

Ill

It would be well, however, to temper our advance notices and expectancies of the next prosperity and maybe run the risk of being old-fashioned in our contentments. It will be treason to repeat it, but I have heard it suggested that the age of push buttons and wall plugs, of magical processes and simple twists of the wrist, is approaching its fullness; that human life has been refined to the core and to pursue invention any further would only end in chaos; that under the sun there is at last, in very truth, nothing new; for science to produce another revolutionary function would be merely ‘showing off.’

Most assuredly we want the idle back at work, credit restored, frozen estates thawed out, business mortality reduced, purse strings loosened through brisk and gainful intercourse. But I doubt very much if we want another ‘new era.’ The one we have just ‘enjoyed’ was after all pretty much of a flop.

The big chance slipped through our careless fingers because we failed to define our objective. We tacked on too many ciphers and made figures we could not understand. I cannot seriously quarrel with those in high places who, when everything was crumbling all about us, insisted that to-morrow the sun would be shining; to keep fiddling was about all that they could have done. But it was silly of them to press the point, as not a few of them did, that in a jiffy we should be entering upon a period of prosperity greater than ever before. For if the feast that was so lavishly spread for us had to break up in such inglorious disorder, why should anyone so fervently anticipate a still more ribald Saturnale?

In America it is only BIGNESS that counts—congenital, constitutional, uncompromising, superlative bigness. Big cities, big buildings, big business, big men, big fun — a brick-and-mortar culture without much thought to the consequences. The industrialist adds on another shop to assure a bigger output. The farmer has to own ‘the piece next to him ’ so as to have a bigger farm. The capitalist razes a city block and erects a bigger office building. Big banks go together and make a bigger bank. Universities tear down hallowed walls and advertise a bigger university. A big business man makes a success of things and we heap bigger, inhuman tasks upon him.

Bigness went even to the suburbs, where country clubs rose like alcazars. Then, without warning, we became, as it were, ‘ too big for our breeches,’ and there followed an awful contraction in the commercial and the human stature.

It is quite a pitiless process. Economists call it a cyclical phenomenon and point to its periodic occurrence in the past as a guarantee of its perpetuation!

We should all be happier, doubtless, if we placed limits upon our grandeur; if we halted the relentless competition for physical supremacy and paused more often in our travels to the moon. We must have all but reached our El Dorado the day before yesterday; now we are reduced to sackcloth and ashes. Hereafter should we not determine beforehand what will satisfy us, and not damn the first who dares cry, ‘Hold, enough!’

What we need to do, it seems to me, is to make better use of our devices, to pass our days in less hectic pursuits. We keep playing at being pioneers, boasting of our new discoveries and absorbing conquests; yet we have hardly begun to skirmish along the frontier of freedom. Why not a day or two from the office for digging in the garden without making public apologies for our truancy; and surely five days out of seven ought to be enough for selling ribbons, for feeding furnaces, for scribbling in ledgers, for collecting bills.

In my village the merchants habitually close their shops every Wednesday at one, and, while I am occasionally irked at being thwarted in a belated inclination to purchase some trifle or other, I am told that the burghers maintain themselves in a high state of civic, commercial, and spiritual solvency.

IV

All this, I know, represents gross retrogression. It has about it the lethal air of the ‘saturation point.’ It is hardly the doctrine which animates the go-getter; such a programme would be anathema to the man who is ‘ always on his toes.’ But it is elixir to those who are becoming more abstemious as to their toil.

We break our necks evolving new ideas to save time, to save drudgery, to save dollars; we are forever evolving something to bring us more leisure for doing things we have always wanted to do, and before we have spent a care-free hour we are hurrying to a conference to ‘pass’ another miracle.

Casting out the devils of indulgence, we manage to save a little, and the authorities are hard upon us with a thundering urge to spend. The official dictum exhorts us to win our way out through solemn recourse to work, and we see by the papers that last year there were some thirty thousand business failures. We are importuned to pledge ourselves to purchase only American-made goods, when there are alien products which I, for one, would be loath to relinquish. The motor-car salesman is at the door in a frenzy over a new model before I have mastered all the cranks and pedals on the ‘last word’ he sold me six months ago. We are entreated to have courage and stamina, faith, hope, and charity, and I pass my incipient exile¹ in daily dread of being shunted back to work because of nonsupport on the part of corporations whose certificates I have loved too well.

Draw apart a mile or two from the bustle, and presently your front yard is surveyed for a highway, filling stations scar the southern exposure, and mailorder catalogues are waiting for you at breakfast. An adjunct so indispensable as the telephone, which promised only liberation and relief, enthralls my wife daily until noon; I do not know that she is either refreshed or enriched by these multitudinous contacts, but I have noticed that her putting has been falling off and she has had to give up her folk dancing altogether. When the mood is upon me I have, in desperation, suffered the jingle to go unheeded, only to be chastised for not holding up my end of the social contract.

We are, I am afraid, not making the most of our depressions. They come so seldom that we dote too long on devastation. We shall, no doubt, all be the better for our purification. And so, having renewed our loan at the bank and spent our Christmas savings for Easter, let us step out from the shadows of the wailing wall.

Of course, no one except a poet with an ear for royalties would ever pretend that the uses of adversity are sweet; but they have their softer side. During prosperity we are too busy to do much more than read the labels; now we can examine the contents, We can, in sundry pleasant ways, begin spending the time — æons of it — stored up for us by all those time-saving appliances, bought, appropriately enough, on time payments. We can be figuring out how to keep from making more money than we know what to do with, and begin to appreciate how many things we are able to get along without. We can learn how to interpret statements and balance sheets — and interviews with the Chairman of the Board; we can reflect upon the frailty of paper profits and decide upon what ought to be done with the fellow who tells us to ‘put it away and forget it.’

These, if we only knew it, could be the Golden Days of Gloom.