Part 43

In considering the best magazine to publish the paper in, I am very considerably influenced by the opinion I have formed of the editors who have been here to talk over the subject; and of these Ray Stannard Baker was by far the most thorough and enthusiastic in his analysis of the whole subject. He looked at all sides in a way which no other editor dreamed of doing. He even got next to the workingmen and talked to them at great length on the subject. I cannot but feel, also, that the audience which reads the work of men of his type must be an intelligent and earnest audience.

Mr. ——, who has just been here, suggested that among a certain class of people the American Magazine is looked upon as a muckraking magazine. I think that any magazine which opposed the “stand-patters” and was not under the control of the moneyed powers of the United States would now be classed among the muckrakers. This, therefore, has no very great weight with me.

Taylor believed like Henry Ford that the world could take all we could make, that the power of consumption was limitless. “To give the world all it needs is the mission of industry,” he shouted at me one day I spent with him at Boxley (his home near Philadelphia)—shouted it with many picturesque oaths. I have never known a man who could swear so beautifully and so unconsciously.

Mr. Taylor’s system in part or whole had been applied in many factories which I visited in my four years. You knew its outward sign as soon as you entered the yard. Order, routing, were first laws, and the old cluttered shops where you fell over scattered material and picked your way around dump heaps were now models of classified order. A man knew where to find the thing he needed, and things were placed where it took the fewest steps to reach them.

Quite as conspicuous as the physical changes in the shop was the change in what may be called its human atmosphere. Under the Taylor System the business of management was not only planning but controlling what it planned. Management laid out ahead the day’s work for each man at his machine; to him they went with their instructions, to them he went for explanations and suggestions. Office and shop intermingled. They realized their mutual dependence as never before, learned to respect each other for what they were worth. Watching the functioning, one realized men had come to feel more or less as Taylor himself felt: that nothing of moment was ever accomplished save by cooperation, which must be “intimate and friendly.” Praised once for his work on the art of cutting metal he said a thing all leaders would do well to heed:

“I feel strongly that work of any account in order to be done rightly should be done through true cooperation, rather than through the individual effort of any one man; and, in fact, I should feel rather ashamed of any achievement in which I attempted to do the whole thing myself.”

Nothing was more exciting to me than the principles by which Taylor had developed his science. They were the principles he had applied to revolutionary discoveries and inventions in engineering. I made a brief table of them. They make the best code I know for progress in human undertakings:

1) Find out what others have done before you and begin where they left off.

2) Question everything—prove everything.

3) Tackle only one variable at a time. Shun the temptation to try more than one in order to get quick results.

4) Hold surrounding conditions as constant and uniform as possible while experimenting with your variable.

5) Work with all men against no one. Make them want to go along.

There is enduring vitality in these principles and there is universality. They are as good for battered commonwealths as for backward disorganized industries. Think what it would mean in Washington today if all the experimenters began where others had left off, if no demonstrated failure was repeated, if theory was held to be but 25 per cent of an achievement, practice 75, if one variable at a time was experimented with, if time were taken for solutions and above all if everybody concerned accepted “intimate and friendly” cooperation as the most essential of all factors in our restoration.

This hunt for practical application of the Golden Rule in industry left me in much better spirits than my studies of transportation and tariff privileges. The longer I looked into the latter the deeper had been my conviction that in the long run they would ruin the hope of peaceful unity of life in America. They seemed to me inconsistent with democracy as I understood it and certainly inconsistent with my simple notions of what made men and women of character. Were we not getting a larger and larger class interested only in what money would buy? Particularly did I dislike the spreading belief that wealth piled up by a combination of ability, illegality, and bludgeoning could be so used as to justify itself—that the good to be done would cancel the evil done. What it amounted to was the promotion of humanitarianism at the expense of Christian ethics; and that, I believe, made for moral softness instead of stoutness.

But there was nothing soft about the experiments I had been following. Where they succeeded, it was by following unconsciously in general Taylor’s stiff principles. Patient training, stern discipline, active cooperation alone produced safety, health, efficient workmen, abundance of cheap honest output. I had faith in these things. They were the foundation of genuine social service. All desired goods followed them as they became part of the nation’s habit of life, reaching down to its lowest depths.

Many of my reforming friends were shocked because the one and only reason most industrial leaders gave for their experiments was that it paid. Generally speaking, the leaders were the kind who would have cut their tongues out before acknowledging that any other motive than profit influenced them. Certainly they sought dividends; but they believed stability, order, peace, progress, cooperation were back of dividends. That industry which paid must, as Mr. Ford said, “make men.” That the right thing paid, was one of their most far-reaching demonstrations. Men had not believed it. They were proving the contrary; so in spite of the charge of many of my friends that I was going over to the enemy, joining the corporation lawyer and the company nurse, I clung to the new ideals. What I never could make some of these friends see was that I had no quarrel with corporate business so long as it played fair. It was the unfairness I feared and despised. I had no quarrel with men of wealth if they could show performance back of it untainted by privilege.

Sometimes I suspected that the gains I set forth as practical results of this experimenting inside industry were resented by those who had been working for them for years through legislation, organization, agitation, because they had come about by other methods than theirs and generally in a more complete form than they had ventured to demand. But that the idealists had been a driving force behind the new movement inside industry was certain. Their method could not do the thing, but it could and did drive men to prove it could be done.

My critics who charged me with giving comfort to the enemy did not see that often this enemy disliked what I was trying to do even more deeply than my so-called muckraking. Indeed, he took those pictures of new industrial methods and principles as a kind of backhanded muckraking—indirect and so unfair. It threw all established methods of force into a relief as damaging as anything I ever had said about high duties and manipulations of railroad rates.

Whatever challenges my new interest aroused, however confused my own defense of it was, I knew only that I should keep my eye on it and report any development which seemed to me a step ahead. That, of course, was counting on continued editorial sympathy in the American. But hardly had I finished my book before that sympathy was cut off by a change in ownership.

The change was inevitable, things being as they were in the magazine world after 1914. The crew who had manned our little ship so gallantly in 1906 when we left McClure’s had lost only one of its numbers. A few months after we started Lincoln Steffens withdrew. He objected to the editing of his articles, demanded that they go in as he wrote them. The same editorial principles were being applied to his productions that were applied to those of other contributors. They were the principles which he himself had been accustomed to applying and to submitting to on McClure’s. The editorial board decided the policy could not be changed and accepted Steffens’ resignation.

Back of his withdrawal, as I saw it, was Steffens’ growing dissatisfaction with the restrictions of journalism. He wanted a wider field, one in which he could more directly influence political and social leaders, preach more directly his notions of the Golden Rule, which certainly at that time was his chosen guide.

Certainly it was the creed of the American. It had always been John Phillips’ answer to our fervent efforts to change things, “The only way to improve the world is to persuade it to follow the Golden Rule.”

I suppose Steffens had heard of the Golden Rule, but I am certain he had never thought about it as a practical scheme for improving society. It seemed to me, at the time, that it came to him as an illumination, and for some years he held tight to it, preaching it to political bosses, to the tycoons of Wall Street, the Brahmins of Boston, confronting them with amazing frankness and no little satisfaction with their open disregard of its meanings. He became greatly disillusioned finally by discovering that men were quite willing to let their opponents act upon the Golden Rule but much less so to be governed by it themselves.

My first realization that Steffens was struggling with the problem which confronted us all—that is, whether we should stick to our profession or become propagandists—was one day when I looked up suddenly to find him standing by my desk more sober, less certain of himself than I had ever seen him.

“Charles Edward Russell has gone over to the Socialist party,” he said. “Is that not what we should all be doing? Should we not make The American Magazine a Socialist organ?”

I flared. Our only hope for usefulness was in keeping our freedom, avoiding dogma, I argued. And that the American continued to do.

In the years that were to come, wars and revolutions largely occupied Steffens. Wherever there was a revolution you found him. He wrote many brilliant comments on what was going on in the world. When he came back from Russia after the Kerensky revolution he was like a man who had seen a long hoped-for vision.

“I have looked at the millennium and it works,” he told me.