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Page 29
As this situation illustrates a point of great difficulty to which we
have arrived in our development of social ethics, it may be justifiable
to discuss it at some length. Let us recall the facts, not as they have
been investigated and printed, but as they remain in our memories.
A large manufacturing company had provided commodious workshops, and, at
the instigation of its president, had built a model town for the use of
its employees. After a series of years it was deemed necessary, during a
financial depression, to reduce the wages of these employees by giving
each workman less than full-time work "in order to keep the shops open."
This reduction was not accepted by the men, who had become discontented
with the factory management and the town regulations, and a strike
ensued, followed by a complete shut-down of the works. Although these
shops were non-union shops, the strikers were hastily organized and
appealed for help to the American Railway Union, which at that moment
was holding its biennial meeting in Chicago. After some days' discussion
and some futile attempts at arbitration, a sympathetic strike was
declared, which gradually involved railway men in all parts of the
country, and orderly transportation was brought to a complete
standstill. In the excitement which followed, cars were burned and
tracks torn up. The police of Chicago did not cope with the disorder,
and the railway companies, apparently distrusting the Governor of the
State, and in order to protect the United States mails, called upon the
President of the United States for the federal troops, the federal
courts further enjoined all persons against any form of interference
with the property or operation of the railroads, and the situation
gradually assumed the proportions of internecine warfare. During all of
these events the president of the manufacturing company first involved,
steadfastly refused to have the situation submitted to arbitration, and
this attitude naturally provoked much discussion. The discussion was
broadly divided between those who held that the long kindness of the
president of the company had been most ungratefully received, and those
who maintained that the situation was the inevitable outcome of the
social consciousness developing among working people. The first defended
the president of the company in his persistent refusal to arbitrate,
maintaining that arbitration was impossible after the matter had been
taken up by other than his own employees, and they declared that a man
must be allowed to run his own business. They considered the firm stand
of the president a service to the manufacturing interests of the entire
country. The others claimed that a large manufacturing concern has
ceased to be a private matter; that not only a number of workmen and
stockholders are concerned in its management, but that the interests of
the public are so involved that the officers of the company are in a
real sense administering a public trust.
This prolonged strike clearly puts in a concrete form the ethics of an
individual, in this case a benevolent employer, and the ethics of a mass
of men, his employees, claiming what they believed to be their moral
rights.
These events illustrate the difficulty of managing an industry which has
become organized into a vast social operation, not with the co�peration
of the workman thus socialized, but solely by the dictation of the
individual owning the capital. There is a sharp divergence between the
social form and the individual aim, which becomes greater as the
employees are more highly socialized and dependent. The president of the
company under discussion went further than the usual employer does. He
socialized not only the factory, but the form in which his workmen were
living. He built, and in a great measure regulated, an entire town,
without calling upon the workmen either for self-expression or
self-government. He honestly believed that he knew better than they what
was for their good, as he certainly knew better than they how to conduct
his business. As his factory developed and increased, making money each
year under his direction, he naturally expected the town to prosper in
the same way.
He did not realize that the men submitted to the undemocratic conditions
of the factory organization because the economic pressure in our
industrial affairs is so great that they could not do otherwise. Under
this pressure they could be successfully discouraged from organization,
and systematically treated on the individual basis.
Social life, however, in spite of class distinctions, is much freer than
industrial life, and the men resented the extension of industrial
control to domestic and social arrangements. They felt the lack of
democracy in the assumption that they should be taken care of in these
matters, in which even the humblest workman has won his independence.
The basic difficulty lay in the fact that an individual was directing
the social affairs of many men without any consistent effort to find out
their desires, and without any organization through which to give them
social expression. The president of the company was, moreover, so
confident of the righteousness of his aim that he had come to test the
righteousness of the process by his own feelings and not by those of the
men. He doubtless built the town from a sincere desire to give his
employees the best surroundings. As it developed, he gradually took
toward it the artist attitude toward his own creation, which has no
thought for the creation itself but is absorbed in the idea it stands
for, and he ceased to measure the usefulness of the town by the standard
of the men's needs. This process slowly darkened his glints of memory,
which might have connected his experience with that of his men. It is
possible to cultivate the impulses of the benefactor until the power of
attaining a simple human relationship with the beneficiaries, that of
frank equality with them, is gone, and there is left no mutual interest
in a common cause. To perform too many good deeds may be to lose the
power of recognizing good in others; to be too absorbed in carrying out
a personal plan of improvement may be to fail to catch the great moral
lesson which our times offer.
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