The Job Ahead: A Talk to Business Men

On political matters a large part of business and a great part of the people are thinking along sharply different grooves. Neither can afford that. Business cannot afford it because the public consists of its customers and fellow countrymen. The people cannot afford it for the simple reason that in this country it is through business that the aspirations as well as the necessities of all are chiefly served. The late depression made that cruelly plain. That was not confined to business men: it overflowed all bounds, afflicting rich and poor, manufacturer and merchant, artist and artisan, farmer and financier alike.

In the last election, business for the most part was an innocent bystander. It was n’t running for office. It was n’t spellbinding. It got dragged into the hubbub as the conveniently abstract opponent, the popular whipping boy.

Now, with the tumult and the shouting over, where do we find business? The answer is: right where it was. The party returned to power has passed a considerable amount of regulatory legislation in the past four years, some of which gave business a headache, and it seems reasonable to suppose that more legislation of this same kind will be passed in the years ahead.

But it is more to the point to-day for business leadership to spend its energies not so much in guessing what such legislation may be and do as in determining why such legislation seems so popular with the average man. For it is finally to him that business is accountable — he and his are the people. The politician and the government are accountable to the same boss. And it follows that if the politician and the government initiate or encourage legislation restrictive or suppressive to business, they do so for only one reason. They do so because they believe the people will welcome it.

It is imperative that this be kept in mind. The real threat to business is not in Washington, but in the people’s thinking.

And now let us ask ourselves why, in the greatest business country in the world, — in a time when our people as a whole enjoy the highest standard of living ever known, — why the average man seems receptive to a kind of political thinking that to business men seems doubtful or even dangerous? You all know the ancient axiom, ‘Divide to rule.’ It seems evident that business leadership, or at least business spokesmanship, has allowed the critics of business to split business into classifications and segments to suit their own convenience, and then to apply their own provocative labels to such segments, and by the implication in such labels to indict the whole. These are effective tactics. With them you can tear down anything, even the dignity of man.

These tactics are especially effective in America. Our tendency is toward a high susceptibility to labels and a low interest in definitions. We go for or against the name of a thing, without bothering to examine the thing itself. And since this is our common tendency, it is all the more needful that business keep itself intact before the people in its entire and complete aspect, and that in our own thinking we be guided by the same image.

The image which business for its own good should seek to project was drawn some thirty years ago by William Jennings Bryan. He said: ‘We say to you that you have made the definition of a business man too limited in its application. The man who is employed for wages is as much a business man as his employer; the attorney in a country town is as much a business man as the corporation counsel in a great metropolis; the merchant at the crossroads store is as much a business man as the merchant of New York; the farmer who goes forth in the morning and toils all day, who begins in the spring and toils all summer, and who by the application of brain and muscle to the natural resources of the country creates wealth, is as much a business man as the man who goes upon the board of trade and bets upon the price of grain; the miners who go down a thousand feet in the earth, and bring forth from their hiding places the precious metals to be poured into the channels of trade, are as much business men as the few financial magnates who, in a back room, corner the money of the world.’

You may call that good political medicine. It is. But it is more than that. From the standpoint of your own security, it is the sound aspect of business in America, It is the aspect that business leadership should keep before itself and the people, because in that aspect business is the people. Let the average man fix in his consciousness this simple truth, ‘What happens to business happens to me,’ and business can forget its fears. It will have drawn to its banner invulnerable allies by the tens of millions.

Why is it that these tens of millions are not beside this banner now? For one thing, they have never been invited in language they understand. As business has grown corporate in form, it has grown corpulent in speech. Except as it has talked of its wares, which it has learned to do with practised skill, it has spoken with a tongue such as has never been heard between man and man. It emits a sort of oral cotton-batting which bulks large but confuses the understanding and conceals the idea. It does worse than call a spade an agricultural implement: it calls it an item of inventory or a factor in overhead.

One other reason may be this. Responsible business expects to make good on its word. When it speaks, it tries to come as near the precise truth as it can. Truth is stern. Truth is inclined to challenge the rise of hope over experience. Truth may be respected, but it is seldom loved. So business is likely to be on the unhappy side of the argument — not the glad, thrilling, roseate, romantic side, but the steady, arduous, exact, realistic side. If you did n’t know the answers, for which side would you cheer? Christmas will always be more welcome than the first of the month following.

These things simply mean that business has a harder job to get its story over than the fellow whose mind is not narrowed by knowledge. And therefore it must undertake that job in the realization that to be successful it must employ more persistence, more sensitiveness, more imagination, more trustworthiness, more skill. Can business measure up? Of course! Business in this country has an amazing vitality and resilience. The very resourcefulness that has created our modern industrial structure has made possible an almost unbelievable amount of adjustment to changing conditions so far as business operation is concerned. In other words, business has adjusted itself to shifting styles, faster obsolescence, increased taxes, shorter hours, higher wages, and other elements of cost — and still managed to produce its wares at a price the public could pay, with a pretty fair profit included. In fact, business has done such a good job of adjusting itself over the years that it has frequently confounded the prophets of disaster who pointed out this or that new legislative burden as threatening its destruction.

Does anyone want to destroy business to-day? Certainly no practical politician wants to see business destroyed — for, after all, business is a fat source of taxes. Beyond that, it is a well-publicized source of taxes — which serves a useful purpose in answering the inquiry of where the money is coming from. Does politics want the burden of meeting payrolls? That’s what the politicians would face if the government tried to run all business. Likewise, the practical labor leader would rather wage his fight against business as a separate entity than against government, which, if private business were to be liquidated, would have to take over the job of running the plants. No, it seems likely that, for the most part, business is going to stay in private hands.

What, then, should business be worrying about? Simply this — the longrange, half-formed, and yet clearly discernible distrust and misunderstanding of business in the popular mind. Why blink the fact that shrewd men in office by grace of the ballot box would not badger business unless they felt sure it was politically popular to do so? This is not new. It has been going on, and growing, over a long time.

For more than forty years there has existed in this country a substantial section of the public which is willing to applaud anyone who subjects business to attack. You cannot easily dismiss that substantial section as the Have Nots, radicals, or the masses. They are none of these. They are of the rank and file — your workers, your neighbors, in some cases your own sons.

It is ironical that this has happened to business in its years of greatest social serviceability. If we dig for the origin we find it in a book written nearly seventy years ago, in an alien and old-world setting, by a German socialist named Karl Marx. Briefly, Marx crystallized such premises as these: —

Here are the ancestors of most of the thoughts that are troubling a good part of our people to-day. You may say those premises are nonsense. You may say that at the very time these alien theories were being written America was busy building a new world in which none of them held true, and that any sensible person in America ought to know it. But the fact of the matter is, a great many otherwise sensible people do not know it. Having no other background of economics and little if any of industrial history, they grasp this sophistry as the true gospel. Perhaps the greatest single service that could be rendered to American business to-day would be the production of a sound critique of Marx’s Das Kapital, to be called Das Bunk.

Meanwhile, it will not suffice to ignore its influence. Nor will it suffice to blast its conclusions among yourselves. You can point out that the core of Marxian philosophy is the existence of hard-and-fast classes, whereas in America men born in log cabins could rise to the Presidency, and men who began life on the farm, the railroad, in the mill, the mine, the machine shop, or behind the counter could become the heads of great businesses.

Or you can say that Marx, dealing with downtrodden labor which worked only for bare subsistence, missed entirely the American conception, under which the group that Marx calls ‘labor’ receives to-day nearly three quarters of our national business income. He missed the American idea that the men and women who work for wages are in fact the best market for the wares which industry produces. He regarded machines as a means of lengthening the hours of work, because a man did not get tired so quickly. History has already answered that. He tried to exclude from his conclusions the use of labor-saving machinery on the farm, saying that it did not create unemployment — yet the truth is, if crops were planted or harvested in America to-day by the same methods used in 1850, it would require the work of 30,000,000 additional farm hands to feed the American public. Released for other work, these millions gravitated to cities. The farm population shrank from 57 per cent in 1890 to 36 per cent in 1930 — and the growth of industry absorbed the big part of this shift. So if anyone wants to place blame for what unemployment exists to-day, let him look to labor saving without opening new markets, which has been the case with agriculture, rather than to industry, which has done the opposite and steadily created more jobs.

But it does little good for us to tell each other facts such as these, except as we do something about them. Industry’s necessity is to win the confidence and allegiance of the American people.

In this task, it will be well to remember that good public relations mean good human relations. And good human relations, like charity, begin at home. If business cannot sell industry to its own men, don’t think it can be sold permanently to the public. In this task, too, it will be well to remember that business is less in a battle than in a courtship. The object of the courtship is to win the fickle public’s favor. You will do better as a lover if you exhibit charm, good humor, gallantry, thoughtfulness, daring, romance, than if you exhibit stubbornness, pomposity, fatuousness, bad temper, and faultfinding.

So, let your personality be more in the guise of Clark Gable than of Scrooge. In the language of the street, say it with flowers, and not with spinach. Above all, say it! Say what business honestly has to say in its own behalf. Nowadays the rôle of the strong silent man is of doubtful wisdom, so rare is the discrimination which can distinguish being silent from simply being dumb.

And what a story business has, clamoring to be told! All that there is of good principle, of firm courage, of bold vision, of high adventure, of great risk, has place in it. There are sorry chapters, of course, — even contemptible ones, — and it is the solemn obligation of business to reduce these in the future as much and as sincerely as it can. But there are also sacrifice and human kindness and success and vast serviceability — in towering and overwhelming proportion. Here is drama beyond stage or screen. Here is romance beyond the most empurpled lines of fiction. Here is hope for man and his children, not spoken in easy passages from the rostrum, but grimly at work in the shop, building a better world of materials durable and true.

In telling this story, let both your words and your acts be simple. This is a personal world. The gentlest humanist is likely to have only an academic interest in a famine in Tibet if his tooth aches. So with the man you are trying to reach. He is fighting circumstance and time. He is staving off fear, debt, weariness, discouragement — and trying to have a little fun and comfort meanwhile. He is too busy to listen to you if he has to unravel cloudy abstract language.

And in telling your story to the people be guided by two tested principles. As to the first of these, one morning I watched a couple of cowpunchers going out to bring in a wild steer from his range in the mountains. I noticed they took along one of those shaggy little gray donkeys — a burro. Now a big three-year-old steer that’s been running loose in the timber is a tough customer to handle. But these cowboys had the technique. They got a rope on this steer they were after, and then they tied him neck and neck, right up close, to the burro.

When they let go, that burro had a bad time. The steer threw him all over the place. He banged him against trees, rocks, into bushes. Time after time they both went down. But there was one great difference between the burro and the steer. The burro had an idea. He wanted to go home. And no matter how often the steer threw him, every time the burro got to his feet he took a step nearer the corral. This went on and on. After about a week the burro showed up at ranch headquarters. He had with him the tamest and sorriest-looking steer you ever saw.

That principle is concerned with knowing where you want to go, having an idea that will take you there, and sticking to it.

The other principle has to do with hog-calling. Some years ago a gentleman named Mr. Fred Patzcl entered a hog-calling contest out in Iowa. He had a reverberant voice. He could stand in a pasture and send that voice rolling across hill and dale. He could do it so well that he could call hogs to him from farther off than anyone else. He won the contest, and became the national hog-calling champion. When reporters asked Mr. Patzel to what he attributed his success, he replied in terms which I have come to think are the sum of good advertising. He said: ‘You have to have appeal, as well as power, in your voice. You have to convince the hogs you have something for them.’

Business faces the job of selling itself to the country. It can do this if it will. It is a job needing greatly to be done, not alone in the interest of business, but also in the interest of the people of America. I sincerely believe this, because I believe that no matter how well that job may be done it can still be said of business, as Emerson said of Lord Chatham: ‘Those who listened to him, felt that there was something finer in the man, than anything which he said.’