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The Memorial Quadrangle occupies an entire city square, upon which formerly stood the Old Gymnasium, the Peabody Museum, Pierson Hall, and various other buildings. Underneath the corner-stone (at the right) is a stone from each of the college buildings formerly in this square. This corner-stone was laid on the 200th anniversary of the starting of the first college building at New Haven. The old Library of the College stands near by, across the street

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THE TWO GREAT TOWERS OF THE MEMORIAL QUADRANGLE Wrexham Tower, at the left, is here seen from Branford Court. It is designed after the tower of the little Welsh church where Elihu Yale lies buried. Over the doorway of the entrance to Wrexham Tower is a stone brought from Wrexham Tower in Wales. Harkness Tower, on the right, is here seen from the corner of York and Library Streets. The view includes the varied lines of the mass of buildings on the Library Street side of the Quadrangle

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T

OUT OF THE TOGA AND
AND INTO
INTO OVERALLS'

BY FREDERICK M. DAVENPORT

PROFESSOR IN LAW AND POLITICS, HAMILTON COLLEGE; REPUBLICAN MEMBER
OF THE NEW YORK STATE SENATE; AND FORMERLY FACTORY NO. 4626

THE NEW FRIENDSHIP IN THE FACTORY

BASELESS FEARS OF REVOLUTION-PERSONALITY IN MANAGEMENT-THE SQUARE DEAL-SOME MISTAKES OF THE MANAGERS-THE FAULTS AND PROMISE DEMOCRACY-UNION MEMBERS AND GENUINE OPEN SHOPS

OF INDUSTRIAL

HERE is no revolution in the air among the factory workers of America, so far as I could see. But there is a great inchoate yearning and a feeling that the development of men has not received the attention from industrial management which has been given to the development of the machine. Cyrus McCormick, Jr., in the "Harvester World," strikes the keynote:

Automatic machinery, progressive machining and assembling, have come to stay. Do we make as good use of man power as of machine power? Are we taking better care of machines than we are of men? No factory superintendent would consent to the operation of any gear-cutter which was so dulled as to cause its rate of production to drop below the point of efficiency. It is more important that the man should be maintained in good health, that he should have around his home and his work a happy influence, and in a proper sense be unwearied.

There is no revolution in the heart of American workers. Burn and robthese men with whom I spent the summer? They are representative average American citizens, and if they have arson and robbery in their hearts it is in the heart of America-the most orderly country in the world. In the selective draft the Government reached into every home, and there was never a draft riot. The Government took away liquor from millions of people, against the will of a vast number, and there was never a whisky insurrection. The working people of America have no wish to tear our institutions down. They want the corporations to have a square deal. They are not opposed to

1 Senator Davenport entered an automobile factory as a worker last summer. His experiences form the basis of this article, as of that in The Outlook for May 4.

having men of organizing genius as leaders, but they want men who have proved their capacity to lead harmoniously and intelligently in the disciplined comradeship of co-operative production. To provide against revolution between industrial classes in America, against direct action, the general strike, and all that dangerous and unwholesome brood of radicalisms which threaten Europe, we must clear away the menace of either capitalistic or labor class control in this country. Why has labor in England again and again seemed disloyal to the Government? The reason is to be found in the tragedy of the long struggle of English labor with a landed and manufacturing class government which for generations denied labor justice.

There were seventy-five years of the factory system before the labor of women and older children was reduced from twelve to ten hours a day, and sixty years of it before the labor of children between nine and thirteen was reduced to eight hours and employment in the mills of children under nine years of age was finally prohibited. There was a long period when, out of sight in the mines of England, children from five years upward appear to have worked for long hours sometimes for ten cents a day.

The terrible battle against a government which for many years refused to workingmen the right to organize, which permitted an exploitative degradation of the homes of labor, the battle against laissez-faire economists with their upperclass-comforting theories that nothing could be done which would not make matters worse-all this is burned into the soul of the English working class and accounts to-day for their seeming lack of patriotism. We are told that trade-unionism in England has agreed

to receive into its ranks only a few of the men returned from the war. This seems incredible, but it is understandable.

"What has the country ever done for us?" they demand. "What have we to thank the Government for? How did we get where we are? Behind us is a century and a half of the agony of a struggle against influences which tried to deprive us and our children of our rights as human beings."

Sometimes in this country we hear the sullen murmur of labor against the militia. It is not that labor is unpatriotic, but that many times the militia has been used for class purposes, and not impartially for the common welfare. Sometimes we hear labor denounce the courts, but it is because some biased judges, trained in the corporate cult, have used arbitrary mandates of injunction against the weak and helpless. Elihu Root, in a speech before the Constitutional Convention of the State of New York in 1915, on "The Invisible Government," showed that for forty years neither the people nor the common welfare had been in power in the State of New York. And of course the same conditions were prevalent in more than a dozen other great States where autocratic and sometimes corrupt influence controlled the puppets of politics. In recent years, since the deplorable Adamson incident in the Federal Congress of 1916, and during the war while labor had its opportunity to make or break the world, there was danger of the other extreme, and there still is. The general strike upon public or quasipublic utilities is a paralyzing weapon. But the way out is not through a return to the control of government by capitalism, but by the upbuilding of government so intelligent, so just, that both

capital and labor shall be its devoted supporters and not its masters.

FAULTS OF THE MANAGERS

My work in a factory has convinced me that making industry more intelligent and human is what is needed. This applies to the farm as much as to the factory, but the factory situation is far more critical. And the chief factory problem is to make the management more intelligent and human. I am not decrying the genius of American industrial management; it is the best in the world, and in many directions is highly specialized and able, and it is developing some men of extraordinary vision. But, by and large, management is still too disregardful of the best interests of industry and of the country. The danger is narrow specialization. Their philosophy is a hand-to-mouth, day-to-day philosophy. Let us get over this particular trouble until to-morrow. What's the use of star-gazing into the future? Why worry about ten years from now? Ten years from now we may all be dead.

The industrial struggle is not, as it is frequently phrased, between capital and labor, but between management and labor. It sometimes happens that the capitalist is also the manager, but not usually. Poor capital very frequently has a tough fight for existence. But the historic autocracy of management has created the labor disorders of the world, and the human wisdom of management can cure these disorders better than any other single influence. Management has the power and the opportunity. Industrial management in the next generation can make or break not only American industry but America. If it treks back to the old corrupt political methods and the old arrogant industrial methods, America is gone. But if it suffuses its genius with that sort of humanity which makes for both efficiency and good will, it can be of extraordinary service in solving political, social, and economic problems.

It is none too soon to begin to cure the defects in the productiveness of industry and to curb the rising counterarrogance of labor by wiser methods than those of the past. I know there are two sides to this. If management gives a square deal, it has a right to expect one in return. Management cannot yield weakly to labor, because labor will take advantage. Labor is often exacting and will continue to exact something more than scientific management from the employer. Piece-work, the bonus and premium plans, labor is too likely to regard as management's schemes to exact the last pound of effort. Labor is suspicious of the methods of scientific management and will not work well and faithfully under them unless the human relations between management and labor are greatly strengthened. Labor is wearying of passing its life under orders. Labor is growing restive under unbridled power, and is demanding a greater measure of equality and liberty as the basis of any enduring fra

ternity. Labor is growing far more intelligent and far more self-conscious, and is less inclined than ever before to tolerate a merely "superior class" within its area of activity. It will recognize and follow and be devoted to real organizing genius and character, provided that leadership opens the way to workers to realize their new aspirations. Management has far to go and none too much time in which to make good on its obligation. Some of the leaders see the problem as it is and are already doing their part. But the men of smaller and reactionary minds are still in the majority and are inclined to look upon the few really splendid, liberal industrial leaders as men who have deserted their class, traitorously gone back on it a pitiful form of industrial imbecility, and dangerous to the country.

INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY

I have tried to find out what American workingmen in this plant think of industrial democracy. Many persons think that the industrial millennium would come overnight if we could suddenly everywhere establish shop committees and industrial senates and assemblies. I am inclined to be more wary of that view than I was at the beginning of my factory experience. I did not find that this particular body of men, anyway, are hungry for shop committees, industrial senates, or councils. I have no doubt that if some representative method were devised for bringing all sorts of matters to discussion and decision co-operatively between management and labor it would be of great benefit to the plant. But I cannot detect that there is much conscious hankering for forms or institutions.

And I think I have come to a somewhat different conception of the stuff of which industrial democracy really consists. This democratic movement inside of industry is on labor's part a profound and resistless movement for selfexpression. In England it exhibited itself during the war and is doing so increasingly since the war as a movement for freer consultation and human understanding between employer and employee. The old notions of "master" and "betters" are distasteful to both sides in England since the war. The "drivers" among managers and foremen are becoming fewer. There is more cooperation, more effort especially on the part of the management to win loyalty and efficiency through loyalty.

I am not at all certain that the course of industrial democracy in America is to follow that of England. It is entangled with the whole question of free play for individual initiative. Industrial democracy here, as I conceive it, fundamentally means equality of opportunity, a chance for the fittest and the best to come up through, a chance for any ideas to come through from the worker on the floor and at the bench, a chance for grievances to become articulate and to receive attention and remedy, continuous employment and just wages based upon American standards of living,

suitable provision for critical contingencies in the life of the worker, a chance to be masters of their own destiny.

If democratic aspirations are satisfied, I see no tendency among these factory workers of a desire to run the business. There seems to be a genuine admiration for and faith in the leadership of the two men at the top in this particular plant, who for many years have shown the spirit of give and take and good will. I noticed that when the workers have voiced pretty severe criticisms of what is going on they always attribute the trouble to some lieutenant farther down the line, never to these two men at the top. This is the normal attitude of the average human mind, to recognize and follow magnetic leadership. It will continue to operate for a very long time if management is worthy of it. The Bolshevik attitude of antagonism to men of organizing genius and initiative runs against human instincts the world over. British labor, even when it seems to be reaching for final control over government and industry, seems to be perceptibly mellowing in its estimate of the value of brains and executive ability.

If reasonable democratic aspirations are met, we shall have full opportunity in this country, I think, to work out industrial democracy slowly and in line with American traditions. But, to my mind, whether we succeed or not depends entirely upon the degree of humanness which is speedily put into industrial relations, and particularly upon the degree of humanness and vision which irradiates the intelligence of industrial management throughout the country. Militant trades unions engaged in deadly combat with militant employers' associations cannot bring industrial democracy any more than they can bring industrial efficiency and peace. Such combat results either in final control of one party or the other or else in civil war.

What industry needs is time to develop a safe and efficient form of democracy. And the development should be by trial and error, as it has been in political democracy. It should follow the course of evolution, and not revolution. Political democracy has slowly broadened down from precedent to precedent. At first John of England said, "I am the State," and then a few landed barons on the field of Runnymede insisted that he sign Magna Charta. He is credibly reported to have come close to an apoplectic fit in his tent after he signed, but he signed. The landed aristocracy generally came to share the power. Then the men of property, obtained through trade and commerce, demanded a share and obtained it. Then the skilled artisans, then the agricultural laborers, then all manhood within reasonable limits, then all womanhood.

Working slowly by trial and experiment should industrial democracy come. Political democracy has always been silently extending some humble institution which it already possessed until

upon this foundation it built the whole democratic edifice. Some plants have a shop safety committee, either skillfully and fairly appointed in line with the sentiment of the workers or elected directly by the workers. Both sides recognize the value of such a committee. A reasonably rapid but unheralded extension of function of such a committee to include matters of health, of the slighter grievances, and later of wages, hours, and conditions generally, is better than new machinery and elaborate new institutions of democracy. kind, so far as I know, has never done well with more democracy than it could properly assimilate and appreciate at the moment. But we may as well face the fact that the desire for selfexpression among workers creeps resistlessly on, and this instinct must be satisfied if prosperity and ordered liberty are to continue. Just as political autocracy and aristocracy have slowly disappeared, so must merely economic autocracy and aristocracy disappear.

Man

In dealing with the problems of industry America can learn much from England and Australia. Australia is learning the folly of the coercive process of compulsory arbitration except within very limited areas. In England eightyfive per cent of labor is already organized, with all the symptoms of permanent class struggle or else of final labor control. Such an alternative is not pleasing to America and is not American. To do away with the class struggle and to establish a government of all through all under the leadership of the wisest and the best was, I believe, Mazzini's conception of a true democracy. The class struggle establishes caste and the law of the average and levels down initiative even while it levels up the mass.

THE MAN WITH THE SINE

In the tool-room of the plant I asked: "Who is the ablest skilled workman?" And when I learned who he was I talked with him. And I found out that the thing which made him more valuable than anybody else among the one hundred and fifty in the department was his ability to use the sine-bar, something that I had never heard of. The sine-bar is a new trigonometric instrument of exact measurement, largely developed during the war. It involves logarithms and is absolutely accurate, as the micrometer is not. I asked this young man how he learned to use the sine-bar, as I was quite sure he had never had trigonometry in college. said he had had only a common-school education, but when he became interested in the sine-bar he got hold of the drawings and tables of the draughtsman and, working after hours, perfected himself in the use of the sine-bar. And with pride he took down his table of logarithms and told me about the sinebar. When anybody in the tool-room must have a measurement precisely right, he must go to the man who knows the sine-bar.

He

It would be a dangerous thing for the prosperity of the world and for the fu

ture of the race if hundreds of thousands of cases of initiative like this were not appreciated and rewarded and given the freest opportunity to work through to the top. This is America as distinguished from every other country in the world, and it is a distinction that ought not to be lightly thrown away. If we are to stop the movement towards a hard and fast class cleavage in the United States, it can only be by the rapid extension of the principles and interest practices of sound human throughout American industry. government, although it can do something, can do far less than the authoritative managers of our great enterprises throughout the country.

THE STRUGGLE FOR UNIONISM

And

This is not a union plant, although it One employs a good many union men.

of them had been the secretary of a union whose members went on strike in New York State. He had a wife and children. He tried West Virginia, and ran into a strike there. Then he tried East Liverpool, Ohio, but business slackened and he lost his job just after he had spent $400 of his savings to get his family into Ohio, and he was down and out. He was glad to be in a genuine open shop with a well-established industry, but he had no qualms about his course with organized labor except that he was sorry for what his family had had to suffer. He felt that he was fighting in his earlier years a young man's battle for his class and for his principles.

Another had once been in the union, but had had enough of unionism for a lifetime. Some years ago he was working in another great near-by plant. One Monday morning he "went out" with his comrades in defense of what he regarded as justice to his fellows. He had a wife and children and was obliged to get work soon, so he went from factory to factory, but found he had been black-listed. He was a pariah to all factory society because he had joined in a battle for the good of men of his kind as he saw it. For months, although he had but one leg and was a skilled mechanic, he had to dig ditches at small pay, until he slowly crept back out of a union into an open-shop haven.

There was a sense of exhaustion with their struggles on the part of these and other old union men, but I found none who denounced unionism. One of them said to me: "As long as manufacturers have the power of association and blacklisting and punishment, as long as combinations of profiteers have power to put up prices and starve men and bring the working class to time, unionism must exist."

The purpose of a good many shortsighted persons and of certain great commercial organizations at the present moment to make the closed shop "a battling issue," to lock horns with trade-unionism in a final great encounter, is disquieting. Can we learn nothing from history and can we see no better remedy? Unionism is, and always has been, merely a fighting weapon. Industrial autocracy and ex

ploitation, not always deliberately brutal, but thoughtless and class-conscious, have created unionism, and made it necessary to the economic freedom of great areas of employment. Trade-unionism has given collective strength to a great body of reasonably intelligent skilled workers of the free countries, and has lifted standards of justice and profit for the whole working class, whether organized or not. Unionism will exist until the need for it passes. But it is not necessarily a permanent institution. The greatest victory that unionism will ever win will come when there is no further need for unionism.

THE STRAIT-JACKET

There is no reason whatever that the democracy of industry in the United States should follow the path of England and set up a permanent class cleavage between employers and employees, between trade unions and management unions. The democracy of industry in the United States may follow a far more American channel. But it cannot be done through great associations of manufacturers and employers aiding and abetting bitter struggles against the closed shop and making a gigantic public issue thereby. Under those circumstances, the universal strait-jacket closed shop, with all the evils which might follow in its train, will win perhaps through a process not very different from civil war. But the management of American industry has it in its own grasp to make all strait-jacket and un-American methods of battling for human rights unnecessary. A relatively small percentage of American labor has as yet developed a hard and fast system of fighting those whom it regards as its natural foes.

The way to stop any uneconomic or un-American trend of labor is to develop the practical brotherhood of genuine human co-operation inside of every great industrial plant in the country, and to do it soon. Such a plan will spread from the center of great industrial management more swiftly than from any other source. The square deal is still a great solvent. Spending endless energy and time in trying to prevent labor from organizing and using a fighting weapon like the closed shop, as long as the lack of a square deal seems to make such fighting weapons invaluable to class justice, is a foolish and futile method for men to employ who are big enough for the management jobs of America.

As long as there are arrogant, autocratic employers there will be struggles for the closed shop. As long as political machinery seems to be in the power of the capitalist class the labor class will seek to wrest it away through counterintimidation, or the threat of a labor party, or widespread direct action, or some other equally undemocratic method. But the earlier management of industry had a great deal to do with creating the labor disorder. And it is up to the management of American industry, alert, able, and sensible, to cure it.

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