Part 21 (1/2)
Land, in the infancy of the city, was cheap; few settlers there were, and the future could not be foreseen. In 1830 one-quarter of an acre could be bought for $20; a few bits of silver, or any currency whatsoever, would secure to the buyer a deed carrying with it a t.i.tle forever, with a perpetual right of exclusive owners.h.i.+p and a perpetual hold upon all succeeding generations. The more population grew, the greater the value their labor gave the land; and the keener their need, the more difficult it became for them to get land.
Within ten years--by about the beginning of the year 1840--the price of a quarter of an acre in the center of the city had risen to $1,500. A decade later the established value was $17,500, and in 1860, $28,000.
Chicago was growing with great rapidity; a network of railroads converged there; mammoth factories, mills, grain elevators, packing houses:--a vast variety of manufacturing and mercantile concerns set up in business, and brought thither swarms of workingmen and their families, led on by the need of food and the prospects of work. The greater the influx of workers, the more augmented became the value of land. Inevitably the greatest congestion of living resulted.
By 1870 the price of a quarter of an acre in the heart of the city bounded to $120,000, and by 1880, to $130,000.
IT BECOMES WORTH MILLIONS.
During the next decade--a decade full of bitter distress to the working population of the United States, and marked by widespread suffering--the price shot up to $900,000. By 1894--a panic year, in which millions of men were out of work and in a state of appalling dest.i.tution--a quarter of an acre reached the gigantic value of $1,250,000.[173] At this identical time large numbers of the working cla.s.s, which had so largely created this value, were begging vainly for work, and were being evicted by the tens of thousands in Chicago because they could not pay rent for their miserable, cramped habitations.
By exchanging a few hundred, or a few thousand dollars, in Chicago's extreme youth, for a sc.r.a.p of paper called a deed, the buyer of this land found himself after the lapse of years, a millionaire. It did not matter where or how he obtained the purchase money: whether he swindled, or stole, or inherited it, or made it honestly;--so long as it was not counterfeit, the law was observed. After he got the land he was under no necessity of doing anything more than hold on to it, which same he could do equally well, whether in Chicago or buried in the depths of Kamschatka. If he chose, he could get chronically drunk; he could gamble, or drone in laziness; he could do anything but work.
Nevertheless, the land and all its values which others created, were his forever, to enjoy and dispose of as suited his individual pleasure.
This was, and is still, the system. Thoroughly riveted in law, it was regarded as a rational, beneficent and everlasting fixture of civilized life--by the beneficiaries. And as these latter happened to be, by virtue of their possessions, among the real rulers of government, their conceptions and interests were embodied in law, thought and custom as the edict of civilization. The whole concurrent inst.i.tutions of society, which were but the echo of property interests, p.r.o.nounced the system wise and just, and, as a reigning force, do still so proclaim it. In such a state there was nothing abnormal in any man monopolizing land and exclusively appropriating its revenues. On the contrary, it was considered a superior stroke of business, a splendid example of astuteness. Marshall Field was looked upon as a very sagacious business man.
FIELD'S REAL ESTATE TRACTS.
Field bought much land when it was of comparatively inconsequential value, and held on to it with a tenacious grip. In the last years of his life, his revenues from his real estate were uninterruptedly enormous.
”Downtown real estate in Chicago,” wrote ”a popular writer” in a typically effusive biographical account of Field, published in 1901, ”is about as valuable, foot for foot, as that in the best locations in New York City. From $8,000 to $15,000 a front foot are not uncommon figures for property north of Congress street, in the Chicago business district.
Marshall Field owns not less than twenty choice sites and buildings in this section; not including those used for his drygoods business. In the vicinity of the Chicago University buildings he owns square block after block of valuable land. Yet farther south he owns hundreds of acres of land in the Calumet region--land invaluable for manufacturing purposes.”
This extension and centralization of land owners.h.i.+p were accompanied by precisely the same results as were witnessed in other cities, although these results were the sequence of the whole social and industrial system, and not solely of any one phase. Poverty grew in exact proportion to the growth of large fortunes; the one presupposed, and was built upon, the existence of the other. Chicago became full of slums and fetid, overcrowded districts; and if the density and congestion of population are not as great as in New York, Boston and Cincinnati, it is only because of more favorable geographical conditions.
Field's fortune was heaped up in about the last twenty years of his life. The celerity of its progress arose from the prolific variety and nature of his possessions. To form even an approximate idea of how fast wealth came in to him, it is necessary to picture millions of men, women and children toiling day after day, year in and year out, getting a little less than two parts of the value of what they produced, while almost nine portions either went to him entirely or in part. But this was not all. Add to these millions of workers the rest of the population of the United States who had to buy from, or in some other way pay tribute to, the many corporations in which Field held stock, and you get some adequate conception of the innumerable influxions of gold which poured into Field's coffers every minute, every second of the day, whether he were awake or asleep; whether sick or well, whether traveling or sitting stock still.
HIS INCOME: $500 TO $700 AN HOUR.
This one man had the legal power of taking over to himself, as his inalienable property, his to enjoy, h.o.a.rd, squander, bury, or throw in the ocean, if his fancy so dictated, the revenue produced by the labor of millions of beings as human as he, with the same born capacity for eating, drinking, breathing, sleeping and dying. Many of his workers had a better digestive apparatus which had to put up with inferior food, and, at times, no food at all. He could eat no more than three meals a day, but his daily income was enough to have afforded him ten thousand sumptuous daily meals, with exquisite ”tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs,” while periods came when those who drudged for him were fortunate to have any meals at all.
Few of his workers received as much as $2 a day; Field's income was estimated to be at the rate of about $500 to $700 an hour.
First--and of prime importance--was his wholesale and retail drygoods business. This was, and is, a line of business in which frantic compet.i.tion survived long after the manufacturing field had pa.s.sed over into concentrated trust control. To keep apace with compet.i.tors and make high profits, it was imperative not only to resort to s.h.i.+fts, expedients and policies followed by compet.i.tors, but to improve upon, and surpa.s.s, those methods if possible. Field at all times proved that it was possible. No competing firm would pay a certain rate of wages but what Field instantly outgeneraled it by cutting his workers' wages to a point enabling him to make his goods as cheap or cheaper.
HIS EMPLOYEES' WRETCHED WAGES.
In his wholesale and retail stores he employed not less than ten thousand men, women and children. He compelled them to work for wages which, in a large number of cases, were inadequate even for a bare subsistence. Ninety-five per cent. received $12 a week or less. The female sewing-machine operators who bent over their tasks the long day, making the clothes sold in the Field stores, were paid the miserable wages of $6.75 a week. Makers of socks and stockings were paid from $4.57 to $4.75 a week. The working hours consisted variously of from fifty-nine to fifty-nine and a half a week. Field also manufactured his own furniture as well as many other articles. Furniture workers were paid: Machine workers, $11.02, and upholsterers $12.47 a week. All of Field's wage workers were paid by the hour; should they fall sick, or work become slack, their pay was proportionately reduced.
The wretchedness in which many of these workers lived, and in which they still live (for the same conditions obtain), was pitiful in the extreme.
Even in a small town where rent is not so high, these paltry wages would have been insufficient for an existence of partial decency. But in Chicago, with its forbidding rents, the increasing cost of all necessaries, and all of the other expenses incident to life in a large city, their wages were notoriously scanty.
Large numbers of them were driven to herding in foul tenements or evil dwellings, the inducements of which was the rent, a little lighter than could be had elsewhere. Every cent economized meant much. If an investigator (as often happened) had observed them, and had followed them to their wretched homes after their day's work, he would have noted, or learned of, these conditions: Their food was circ.u.mscribed and coa.r.s.e--the very cheapest forms of meat, and usually stale bread. b.u.t.ter was a superfluous luxury. The morning meal was made up of a chunk of bread washed down with ”coffee”--adulterated stuff with just a faint odor of real coffee. At noon, bread and an onion, or a bit of herring, or a slice of cheap cheese composed their dinner, with perhaps a dash of dessert in the shape of sweetened substance, artificially colored, sold as ”cake.” For supper, cheap pork, or a soup bone, garnished occasionally in the season by stale vegetables, and accompanied by a concoction resembling tea. Few of these workers ever had more than one suit of clothes, or more than one dress. They could not afford amus.e.m.e.nts, and were too fatigued to read or converse. At night bunches of them bunked together--sometimes eight or ten in a single room; by this arrangement the rent of each was proportionately reduced.
It is now we come to a sinister result of these methods of exploiting the wage-working girls and women. The subject is one that cannot be approached with other than considerable hesitancy, not because the facts are untrue, but because its statistical nature has not been officially investigated. Nevertheless, the facts are known; stern, inflexible facts. For true historical accuracy, as well as for purposes of humanity, they must be given; that delicacy would be false, misleading and palliative which would refrain from tearing away the veil and from exposing the putridity beneath.
Field was repeatedly charged with employing his workers at such desperately low wages as to drive large numbers of girls and women, by the terrifying force of poverty, into the alternative of prost.i.tution.
How large the number has been, or precisely what the economic or psychologic factors have been, we have no means of knowing. It is worth noting that many official investigations, futile though their results, have probed into many other phases of capitalist fraud. But the department stores over the country have been a singular exception.