Part 22 (1/2)

[176] In the course of inquiries among the Chicago religious missions in 1909, the author was everywhere informed that the great majority of native prost.i.tutes were products of the department stores. Some of the conditions in these department stores, and how their owners have fought every effort to better these conditions, have been revealed in many official reports. The appended description is from the Annual Report of the Factory Inspectors of Illinois, 1903-04, pp. ix and x:

”In this regard, and worthy of mention, reference might be made to the large dry goods houses and department stores located in Chicago and other cities, in which places it has been customary to employ a great number of children under the age of sixteen as messenger boys, bundle wrappers, or as cash boys or cash girls, wagon boys, etc. In previous years these children were required to come to work early in the morning and remain until late at night, or as long as the establishment was open for business, which frequently required the youngsters to remain anywhere from 8:00 to 9:00 o'clock in the morning until 10:00 and 11:00 p.m., their weak and immature bodies tired and worn out under the strain of the customary holiday rush. In the putting a stop to this practice of employing small children ten and thirteen hours per day, the department found it necessary to inst.i.tute frequent prosecutions. While our efforts were successful, we met with serious opposition, and in some cases almost continuous litigation, some 300 arrests being necessary to bring about the desired results, which finally secured the eight hour day and a good night's rest for the small army of toilers engaged in the candy and paper box manufacturing establishments and department stores.

”In conducting these investigations and crusades the inspectors met with some surprises in the way of unique excuses. In Chicago a manager of a very representative first cla.s.s department store, one of the largest of its kind, gave as his reason for not obeying the law, that they had never been interfered with before. Another, that the children preferred to be in the store rather than at home. The unnaturalness of this latter excuse can be readily realized by anyone who has stepped into a large department store during the holiday season, when the clerks are tired and cross and little consideration is shown to the cash boy or cash girl who, because he or she may be tired or physically frail, might be a little tardy in running an errand or wrapping a bundle. This character of work for long hours is deleterious to a child, as are the employments in many branches of the garment trade or other industries, which labor is so openly condemned by those who have been interested in anti-child labor movements.”

[177] For detailed particulars see that part of this work comprising ”Great Fortunes from Public Franchises.”

[178] The acts here summarized are narrated specifically in Part III, ”Great Fortunes from Railroads.”

CHAPTER X

FURTHER VISTAS OF THE FIELD FORTUNE

But if only to give at the outset a translucent example of Field's method's in the management of industrial corporations, it is well to advert here to the operations of one of his many properties--the Pullman Company, otherwise called the ”Palace Car Trust.” This is a necessary part of the exposition in order to bring out more of the methods by which Field was enabled to fling together his vast fortune.

The artificial creation of the law called the corporation was so devised that it was comparatively easy for the men who controlled it to evade personal, moral, and often legal, responsibility for their acts.

Governed as the corporation was by a body of directors, those acts became collective and not individual; if one of the directors were a.s.sailed he could plausibly take refuge in the claim that he was merely one of a number of controllers; that he could not be held specifically responsible. Thus the culpability was s.h.i.+fted, until it rested on the corporation, which was a bloodless thing, not a person.

FIELD'S PULLMAN WORKS.

In the case of the Pullman Co., however, much of the moral responsibility could be directly placed upon Field, inasmuch as he, although under cover, was virtually the dictator of that corporation.

According to the inventory of the executors of his will, he owned 8,000 shares of Pullman stock, valued at $800,000. It was a.s.serted (in 1901) that Field was the largest owner of Pullman stock. ”In the popular mind,” wrote a puffer, probably inspired by Field himself, ”George M.

Pullman has ever been deemed the dominant factor in that vast and profitable enterprise.” This belief was declared an error, and the writer went on: ”Field is, and for years has been, in almost absolute control. Pullman was little more than a figurehead. Such men as Robert T. Lincoln, the president of the company, and Norman B. Ream are but representatives of Marshall Field, whose name has never been identified with the property he so largely owns and controls.” That fulsome writer, with the usual inaccuracies and turgid exaggerations of ”popular writers,” omitted to say that although Field was long the controlling figure in the management of the Pullman works, yet other powerful American multimillionaires, such as the Vanderbilts, had also become large stockholders.

The Pullman Company, Moody states, employed in 1904, in all departments of its various factories at different places, nearly 20,000 employees, and controlled 85 per cent of the entire industry.[179] As at least a part of the methods of the company have been the subject of official investigation, certain facts are available.

To give a brief survey, the Pullman Company was organized in 1867 to build sleeping cars of a feasible type officially patented by Pullman.

In 1880 it bought five hundred acres of land near Chicago. Upon three hundred of these it built its plant, and proceeded, with much show and advertis.e.m.e.nt of benevolence, to build what is called a model town for the benefit of its workers. Brick tenements, churches, a library, and athletic grounds were the main features, with sundry miscellaneous accessories. This project was heralded far and wide as a notable achievement, a conspicuous example of the growing altruism of business.

THE NATURE OF A MODEL TOWN.

Time soon revealed the inner nature of the enterprise. The ”model town,”

as was the case with imitative towns, proved to be a cunning device with two barbs. It militated to hold the workers to their jobs in a state of quasi serfdom, and it gave the company additional avenues of exploiting its workers beyond the ordinary and usual limits of wages and profits.

In reality, it was one of the forerunners of an incoming feudalistic sway, without the advantages to the wage worker that the lowly possessed under medieval feudalism. It was also an apparent polished improvement, but nothing more, over the processes at the coal mines in Pennsylvania, Illinois and other States where the miners were paid the most meager wages, and were compelled to return those wages to the coal companies and bear an incubus of debt besides, by being forced to buy all of their goods and merchandise at company stores at extortionate rates. But where the coal companies did the thing boldly and crudely, the Pullman Company surrounded the exploitation with deceptive embellishments.

The mechanism, although indirect, was simple. While, for instance, the cost of gas to the Pullman Company was only thirty-three cents a thousand feet, every worker living in the town of Pullman had to pay at the rate of $2.25 a thousand feet. If he desired to retain his job he could not avoid payment; the company owned the exclusive supply of gas and was the exclusive landlord. The company had him in a clamp from which he could not well escape. The workers were housed in ugly little pens, called cottages, built in tight rows, each having five rooms and ”conveniences.” For each of these cottages $18 rent a month was charged.

The city of Chicago, the officials of which were but the mannikins or hirelings of the industrial magnates, generously supplied the Pullman Company with water at four cents a thousand gallons. For this same water the company charged its employees ten cents a thousand gallons, or about seventy-one cents a month. By this plan the company, in addition, obtained its water supply for practically nothing. Even for having shutters on the houses the workers were taxed fifty cents a month. These are some specimens of the company's many devious instrumentalities for enchaining and plundering its thousands of workers.

In the panic year of 1893 the Pullman Company reduced wages one-fourth, yet the cost of rent, water, gas--of nearly all other fundamental necessities--remained the same. As the average yearly pay of at least 4,497 of the company's wage workers was little more than $600--or, to be exact, $613.86--this reduction, in a large number of cases, was equivalent to forcing these workers to yield up their labors for substantially nothing. Numerous witnesses testified before the special commission appointed later by President Cleveland, that at times their bi-weekly checks ran variously from four cents to one dollar. The company could not produce evidence to disprove this. These sums represented the company's indebtedness to them for their labor, after the company had deducted rent and other charges. Such manifold robberies aroused the bitterest resentment among the company's employees, since especially it was a matter of authentic knowledge, disclosed by the company's own reports, that the Pullman factories were making enormous profits. At this time, the Pullman workers were $70,000 in arrears to the company for rent alone.

THE PULLMAN EMPLOYEES STRIKE.

Finally plucking up courage--for it required a high degree of moral bravery to subject themselves and their families to the further want inevitably ensuing from a strike--the workers of the Pullman Company demanded a restoration of the old scale of wages. An arrogant refusal led to the declaration of a strike on May 11, 1894. This strike, and the greater strike following, were termed by Carroll D. Wright, for a time United States Commissioner of Labor, as ”probably the most expensive and far-reaching labor controversy which can properly be cla.s.sed among the historic controversies of this generation.”[180] The American Railway Union, composed of the various grades of workers on a large number of railroads, declared a general sympathetic strike under the delegated leaders.h.i.+p of Eugene V. Debs.