MEN WITHOUT VISION
by David Arthur Walters
Labor Day 2019
I was sidetracked while preparing Sadie for publication. I had asked the Library of Congress in vain for copies of the 'Harpoon', a publication Sarah E. Walters had mentioned in her journal of the fearsome ordeal she suffered at the hands of the gang that ran Pittsburgh from 1914 to 1915, during her crusade against gambling, drunkenness and narcotics, and for a “system with clean men.” Apparently there are no surviving copies of that muckraking weekly at the national library.
“It was Harry Willock,” wrote Sadie in 1914, “the grand jury foreman, who was instrumental in making me take the step that almost cost me my reason, liberty, and life. There was a publication, called the Harpoon, pretending to fight the vested interests. A man by the name of Edward Noel Jones was editor. Mr. Willock gave me a card of introduction; he said this man would help me bring to public notice the way I had been mistreated by different people. I went away, trusting. Mr. Jones wanted to get into the good graces of the very people he had been fighting.”
Sadie, who would die in 1918, had Jones pegged. Considerable information about him may be found in the 1936 Congressional Record. He was an opportunistic public-relations man and entrepreneur who changed political horses again, from right to left, at just the right time, and he eventually became the best W.P.A. administrator in the United States; that is, if we are to believe the testimony of Harry L. Hopkins.
Jones founded the Harpoon, a muckraking sheet, and himself became known as “Harpoon Jones” after briefly serving Pittsburgh newspapers as a cub reporter adept at spinning his reports to serve the interests of whatever paper he happened to be working for. The main target of his barbed attacks in the Harpoon was the Pittsburgh Railway Company; the source of his inside information was allegedly supplied by C. K. Robinson, a city attorney during Republican Mayor William A. Magee's first term. The mudslinging paid off: big railroad ads soon appeared in the Harpoon instead of pointed attacks against the railroad. Jones folded the Harpoon and became secretary to Magee, whom he had served as campaign publicist during his second term as mayor, mixing journalism with politics. He was then appointed superintendent of police, a position that did not last long in “the smoky city built on whiskey.” Scandals he refused to speak to would force his resignation “for personal reasons” in 1923.
None of the series of enterprises Jones launched lasted long but the Construction Digest, a trade paper he conceived while he owned a ready-mixed cement company and rubbed shoulders with contractors doing major public works projects for the city during Magee's tenure. Sensing a shift in political winds from Republican to Democratic, he became publicist for local and state Democratic campaigns. The Construction Digest prospered through an ingenious subscription scheme as it published invitations to bid on Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Northern Virginia state contracts, as well as on Federal contracts.
Jones had forged a close friendship during the Great War with one Joseph Guffrey when Guffrey was a member of the War Industries Board's Petroleum Division, and Director of the Bureau of Sales in the Alien Property Custodians. Jones handled public relations and advertising for the entity. “Boss” Guffrey, we learn, would be indicted for misusing funds, but the charges were dropped as part of a deal over the Teapot Dome Scandal. Guffrey, a New Deal Democrat, was elected U.S. Senator; Jones was a natural for WPA director for Pennsylvania.
Guffrey vigorously defended Jones in the Senate against an attack by Republican Senator Daniel Orin Hastings, who had presented the senators with a sketch of Jones's career. Quoting troubling newspaper reports, Hastings insinuated that Jones was corrupt and incompetent. As if that were not enough, he insisted on technical grounds that Jones, given the size of his salary, should be dismissed because his appointment had not been confirmed by the Senate as seemingly required. The allegations were pre-textual; the facts did not really matter: The struggle between the liberal New Dealers and the conservative Republicans over the W.P.A. was ideological, each party having blind faith in its political religion. The disagreement over whether or not the W.P.A. shortened or lengthened the Great Depression in the United States has not to this day been resolved to every political economist's satisfaction.
The notion that government itself should make work and hire people to take up the slack during economic downturns is politically incorrect today on both sides of the aisle; however that may be, unemployment nowadays looks deceptively low. Genuine full employment is worth reconsideration because a financial panic and even war and revolution is in the cards as well as climate change disasters. At least Louis Blanc's workshop concept should be revisited; the 1848 Revolution in France afforded an opportunity for government to fund companies formed and operated by unemployed workers. The self-destructive, divisive polity represented by today's moronic Republican in the White House after the salvation of the nation from the Great Recession by the mulatto he loves to hate may well be the precursor to the sort of economic calamity that the W.P.A. was intended to resolve when the economy went bust after the Great War.
Senator Guffrey placed a copy Jones' 30 December 1935 speech to the Pittsburgh Hungry Club on the Congressional Record; Jones' possessed formidable rhetorical skills: his detractors called his speeches political ballyhooing. He naturally cited numerous facts justifying the existence of the W.P.A. Hundreds of thousands of Pennsylvania workers were thrown out of work, even though enough public work could be imagined to employ them all. Indeed, the benefits of full employment would exceed the costs!
May Heaven forbid it, prayed the fiscal conservatives; that would only add to the deficit and run up the debt. The free market will recover under its own volition, thanks to the Invisible Hand, so let the market manipulated by us decide what is best for the nation. The private companies of conservative campaign contributors should be engaged to do whatever public work is feasible in the circumstances. Besides, a certain degree of unemployment is a good thing because it cheapens labor, making wage slaves of the fearful workforce.
But it seems that efficiency is the weakness of private capitalism when the objective is monetary profit alone. Capitalism endeavors to enhance profit with technological advances, mainly, labor-saving devices. A company may have inept management or may have some charity cases on the payroll, but business cannot be expected to hire labor unprofitably. Capitalism in itself is selfish; it lacks conscience; it does not care for anything except return on capital to capitalists. The monstrous corporation limits it liability and discards men and women who have long labored to build its capital, treating them like so much trash for the sake of profit.
Of course it was easier to blame the industrial revolution for the industrial diseases, dislocation and unemployment rather than the unconscionable greed of the captains of industry. People flocked to America when they heard of the wonderful opportunities. The money was good if you brought skills with you, at least until those skills were automated and you were replaced by a machine.
Edwin Campbell Walters, Sadie's father-in-law, an expert sheet metal worker from England, earned $14 a day in 1884, or $105,000 in today's dollars working six days a week; inflation was running at 2%.
“The machinery had not been manufactured that would take the place of men’s hands, so he made very good money,” she recounted. “He was one of the most skillful sheet metal workers in America. He taught many men at the sheet mill and was beloved by his fellow workers more than by his family on account of his very briskness; the very thing that made him disliked in the home made him popular with his fellows, for he was fearless and determined and very outspoken.”
Sadie's own father enjoyed the good times, but he did not live long given the working conditions during the boom, and the family was reduced to dire poverty:
“The mills in and around New Castle, Pennsylvania, had started up in full blast and the good times began to come; but not for Father, dear man: his long continued run of bad luck and never ending responsibility had made him old before his time. He was only 38 years old when God called him home to everlasting rest and peace. He had been such a good kind father that we all felt his loss very keenly. He had contracted chronic catarrh, aggravated by furnace and mill dust which clogged up his head and lungs, and there was no help for him. He had the best physician at that time practicing in New Castle, a Dr. Mont Linville, now dead, an eminent surgeon and physician. My father was mourned by one and all at the time, every man and woman in this little town to which we had moved in 1875 seemed to love their neighbor as themselves. We all lived together in peace and harmony as one big family. There did not seem to be room for anything but love and kindness in the hearts of our neighbors. They were all good to dear Mother, helping her in a thousand ways to tide over this awful bereavement offering homes for us children in some of the best families here.”
Working conditions deteriorated; wages declined thanks to mechanical devices; workers were thrown out of work by financial panics. The bloody failure of the Homestead Strike in 1892 made it evident that the government along with the wealth workers had created belonged to the robber barons. J.P. Morgan pulled the rug out from under the railroad speculations of Archibald McLeod; the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, which was hauling around 60% of the coal from Pennsylvania to New York, collapsed into bankruptcy, and the rope company went belly up; it was not long before a panic brought down several hundred banks and railroads; the depression lasted until 1897. The 1907 panic and related recession soon ensued; J.P. Morgan and his bankers had to bail out the nation to save themselves. Fingers were pointed at the money supply and interest rates. Why bother argue about silver and gold reserves if enough fiat money can be created out of thin air? The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 in hopes of systematically moderating the business cycle, which some wealthy speculators who liked to buy low and sell high thought was a healthy bleeding and rejuvenation.
The sky was the limit for the Roaring Twenties; the ceiling crashed down in 1929. People went hungry. My grandmother, who had a small salary from a state government, said dog food was on the family menu. My father, born in Pittsburgh, said the dogs themselves should be canned to feed hungry people, and that being in the Army was like having a father and a mother provide housing and food and discipline, well worth reenlisting during the war. The employment boom during World War II, the continuation of the Great War, would put everyone back to work in one way or another, pulling the nation out of the Great Depression. It was feared that unemployment would soar after the war ended, as it had done before, wherefore the original intent of the liberal conception of the 1946 Employment Act, expressed in the 1945 Full Employment Bill, was full employment; that is, the guarantee that anyone willing to work has not only an abstract right to work but a right to a concrete job.
The government was finally changing hands, and those hands felt it was responsible for the constitutional welfare of the people. Edward Noel Jones told the Hungry Club that the subject of his speech was not the W.P.A. Rather, he entitled it 'Men Without Vision.'
“The 230,000 persons now on W. P. A. payrolls in this Commonwealth represent a true cross section of our society, and one could talk for hours about the useful work that is being done on the 4,000 projects that are now under way in this State. But what I want to discuss here today is not what the Works Progress Administration has done, not what the works Progress Administration is doing, but what the Works Progress Administration could do and might do in Pennsylvania, and particularly in Pittsburgh, if there were men in places of power in public life and in industry and in finance who had vision. and not only vision but courage as well, courage to speak out before their fellow men and reveal what they know in their hearts to be true , and, after they have revealed the truth, to take the initiative and act and lead in accordance with the truth as they see it. Therefore, the title of my subject today is not the W. P. A., but Men Without Vision.”
Jones said he was not opposed to labor-saving devices in mills and mine and factories. Men who invent machines and methods do have vision, he admitted, but it is limited vision. Men Without Vision throw thousands of men and women out of work to reduce costs and maintain dividends, then leave them there to starve or get in line for soup. Therefore Men Without Vision are men without conscience. They do not hesitate to ruin people's lives and even kill them with dangerous products for the sake of profit. Indeed, they are even ready to wage destructive wars. Would continuously waging war for peace result in full employment if the creative destruction were kept at an optimum equilibrium?
“Physical destruction entails only burial expenses, sometimes not even that,” Jones said. “Economic destruction of mankind creates a financial and social debt that, while it may be calculated in money, the he real cost to the Nation in the destruction of morale, of self-respect, of discipline, of character, can never be calculated.”
Captains of industry and finance would be men of vision if only they were willing to pay enough taxes from their surplus to keep idled workers employed, whether by business or by the government. They are unwilling to do so because they are Men Without Vision; therefore, they must be forced to pay taxes to maintain full employment.
“Due to the installation of labor-saving devices in Pennsylvania's mills, mines, and factories, there are today some three or four hundred thousand victims of technological unemployment in this State, men and women who will never get jobs even when business to normal. These men and women represent a direct economic loss of some $15,000,000 a month,$180,000,000 a year. In the anthracite region of this State are thousands of miners who never can or will return to the mines. The work they did is now being done better and cheaper by electrical robots. So, too, in our bituminous-coal fields; and so, too, in this community once known as the workshop of the world. During the past few months the two largest steel producers in the Pittsburgh district announced proposed expenditures of scores of millions of dollars for plant modernization. To keep up with their competitors such improvements are vital and necessary, and the executives of these corporations are to be complimented upon their technical initiative. When the announcements were made in the newspapers that the Carnegie Steel Corporation and the Jones & Laughlin Corporation were to spend scores of millions of dollars in the Pittsburgh district, they were hailed with rejoicing in newspaper editorials. The expenditure of these millions will, it was claimed, restore to Pittsburgh something of her old-time supremacy in the world of Steel. But, may we ask, 'What price supremacy?'
“Now, if these captains of commerce and high lords might say, we’ve got to modernize our plants or go out of business. And so we modernize our plants. We’ve got to reduce our operating costs and the most effective way to reduce operating costs is to reduce labor costs. It's too bad that we've got to discharge hundreds and thousands of our employees, but in view of the fact that the Federal, State, and local governments are taking care of this surplus labor, we don't feel so badly about it. We pay our share of the taxes that produce the funds to keep these men and women on relief.”
Alas, they would not pay the costs of an effective program. They might set up soup kitchens or they might establish bread lines, and with relief taxes eliminated they might even increase their contributions to the community-chest fund. That they are Men Without Vision is proven by their attitude toward President Roosevelt's direct-relief and works-relief program. Mr. Roosevelt recognizes and accepts not only the moral but the legal obligations of government to those discarded by business and industry. When he established the 'dole' big business criticized him for wasting Federal funds. When he substitutes work relief for the 'dole', big business objects that it is too costly. With all the resources at its command, big business is seeking to discredit the Works Progress Administration, sneering at a sincere endeavor to give employment to the men and women big business replaced with its mechanical robots in order that dividends might not be interrupted.”
Most disturbing of all is that Men Without Vision are Men Without Conscience hence do not really care about anything except their own purse and power. Religion worships power; politics distributes it. One man or woman or god would have it all, would be without resistance; but one cannot exist alone, as one, without another to make him one of several. You see, Men Without Vision are blindly loyal to party and president; their ideology worships mere names as if names were substantial; idolatry and logolatry is their heresy.
“Big business wants to wreck the W. P. A. because big business is against President Roosevelt. Big business is for the law of the jungle where the strong live off of the weak. Big business’ idea of relief is soup kitchens....President Roosevelt's idea of relief is work paid for with a security wage.”
He closes his letter with a few quotes from President Wilson, to the effect that capitalism is indispensable for the maintenance and progress of civilization. Yet people around the world are revolting against it for the obvious reason that they are sick and tired of being exploited, putting democracy at risk.
“Democracy has not yet made the world safe against irrational revolution,” said President Wilson. “That supreme task, which is nothing less than the salvation of civilization, now faces democracy, insistent, imperative. There is no escaping it, unless everything we have built up is presently to fall in ruin about us; and the United States, as the greatest of democracies, must undertake it. The road that leads away from revolution is clearly marked, for it is defined by the nature of men and of organized society. “
The sum of the whole matter is this, that our civilization cannot survive materially unless it be redeemed spiritually. It can be saved only by becoming permeated with the spirit of Christ and being made free and happy by the practices which spring out of that spirit. Only thus can discontent be driven out and all the shadows lifted from the road ahead. Here is the final challenge to our churches, to our political organizations, and to our capitalists, to everyone who fears God or loves his country. Shall we not all earnestly cooperate to bring in the New Day?”
Yes, we shall see the New Day one day. The wheel rolls forward because of resistance, grinding it into dust, and that is what humanity has been doing albeit unwittingly: dialectically advancing civilization to the end of history in a comparatively pleasant new world order of fully integrated employment. Technological advances in digital intelligence and pharmacopoeia shall soon allow our race to narcoleptically program individuals to self-regulate in concordance with the consecrated general transubstantiation schemata.
Two, related proposals have actually foreshadowed the salvational development that will follow the impending political-economic collapse: Universal Guaranteed Basic Income, and Full Public Service Employment.
The guaranteed basic income scheme will not work, except in application to disabled persons, because it is contrary to human nature, as can be seen in little children who naturally want to work to be worthwhile. They sense they are someone in their ability to act to help others, that is, to do something for others in one way or another. And others will feel cheated out of that help if a basic income is guaranteed to people unwilling to help. That is, a guaranteed basic income renders a person worthless.
As a matter of fact, there is plenty to go around in this world to feed, clothe and house everyone; the great bulk of the work is performed to produce nonessential goods and perform nonessential services to satisfy wants not needs. For instance, my software has been upgraded to an even more complicated version that I certainly do not need and want. I did not ask for this product improvement, but someone thought I should want it and made work to provide it to me. What can I do except struggle with the new procedure for inserting photographs in a document. And I am having black beans made into what looked like rotini pasta in the bag. I thought I might want it when I saw it, and a brand fanatic in the store effused about it. I purchased it, followed the directions, and am eating some black bean mush, thinking I could have purchased a can of black beans for the same effect.
So what part of our advanced economy is necessary? Twenty percent? So yes, it is possible to guarantee a basic living to persons who are able to work but prefer to do nothing. I personally did not resent paying taxes to be forked over to people on the dole nor did I mind giving the bum on the subway a dollar because I felt the recipients were being paid not to compete with me for my job. Nevertheless, paying people to do nothing when they have the ability to contribute degrades them and the community. People actually like to work because it gives them a sense of identity and dignity through accomplishment. That is why many people will actually work for nothing in their spare time on their own projects, why wealthy people will work for a dollar a year for the government, and why public service employment on beneficial public projects can keep the workforce almost fully employed.
“Full employment” does not mean having to work two or three jobs in order to survive without health insurance in substandard housing. Workers at minimum should have a decent living wage. The reason millions of them do not have a decent living wage in our prosperous country is obvious: Men Without Vision and Men Without Conscience dominate Business, Government, and Education.
That there is anyone without a job who wants a job in our country is downright immoral. There is plenty to do for everybody to prosper, at least to make a decent living; most people are willing to slave for that end, as is made evident by our vast wage-slave economy; the very ambitious are encouraged by the belief that everyone has a chance to become filthy rich.
Organized labor complained that Mexicans took over construction work. In fact, Anglos stole great swaths of Mexico and enslaved them. We are reminded that slavery caused the decline of the Roman Empire because slaves displaced the Roman workforce, managed estates, and purchased their freedom. Did not slaves run the Ottoman Empire? Perhaps Central Americans will be gladly enslaved at the Mexican border and trained to rebuild our dilapidated infrastructure. We could sit on couches, eat grapes, drink champagne and be entertained all day if we were not compelled to manage our fortunes until our slaves are trained to manage them.
Be that as it may, we are warned that our great nation would go flat broke if government borrowed money and hired and trained the unemployed to fix the infrastructure and address climate change and the like. But why would we want to default on what we owe ourselves? Why are we so worried about government debt when that is what money is? Its deficit is to our credit. The Federal Reserve notes in our pockets are instruments of debt. I accepted your dollar in good faith with the understanding I would be paid in services and goods later. The issue is confidence, faith in one dollar, not the money supply that no one really knows much about, because only in “God” can one single dollar be trusted. One of God's mysteries is how, depending on the mood swings of bankers, money deposited in a bank can be loaned out and deposited until it turns into ten times that amount, or balloon to 80 times itself as it did in the mother country. The fact of the matter is that plenty of money or units of exchange can be recorded as digits to buy all the goods and services we may want.
Naturally our system would have to be religiously managed and rationalized in 600-page economics texts for it to be believable; but do not be deceived by the rationalizations of Men Without Vision, who say that the government cannot make sure that everyone who wants to work can make a decent living. Yes they can, says the ghost of Edward Noel Jones, and you had better believe it or be shortchanged.
xYx
My grandparents benefited from the WPA after they sold their farm and worked on building Davis Dam in the rather safe occupation as dishwashers rather than construction workers.
I agree with you that government ownership of the means of production is politically incorrect, but incentives are like those recently introduced to save the US automobile industry and to jumpstart a recovery from the 2008 through 2010 financial debacles and deep recession worked. And, I agree wholeheartedly with you that the full unemployment picture should be presented to the citizenry, not just those seeking employment. Real unemployment is much higher than that figure we see often in the press. So many have given up looking for work because they are not granted work because of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability or criminal record. A travesty to society when these people can become part of the nation's productivity rather than spend the rest of their life on the dole after being cast out. Of course, deadbeats need to be punished by retraining into something they can do positively rather than negatively. Not put into prison or debtors prisons.
The death of Sadie's father at 38 is a very good example of the way that industry treated workers before federal regulations were put in place to help save workers from deplorable conditions that ruined their health while their company owners became rich from their low-paid work.
Your historical account of Edward Noel Jones's speech/letter? given to the Hungry Club in Pittsburgh is very appropriate today. It should be required reading in history classes.
Ron
My grandparents benefited from the WPA after they sold their farm and worked on building Davis Dam in the rather safe occupation as dishwashers rather than construction workers.
I agree with you that government ownership of the means of production is politically incorrect, but incentives are like those recently introduced to save the US automobile industry and to jumpstart a recovery from the 2008 through 2010 financial debacles and deep recession worked. And, I agree wholeheartedly with you that the full unemployment picture should be presented to the citizenry, not just those seeking employment. Real unemployment is much higher than that figure we see often in the press. So many have given up looking for work because they are not granted work because of race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, disability or criminal record. A travesty to society when these people can become part of the nation's productivity rather than spend the rest of their life on the dole after being cast out. Of course, deadbeats need to be punished by retraining into something they can do positively rather than negatively. Not put into prison or debtors prisons.
The death of Sadie's father at 38 is a very good example of the way that industry treated workers before federal regulations were put in place to help save workers from deplorable conditions that ruined their health while their company owners became rich from their low-paid work.
Your historical account of Edward Noel Jones's speech/letter? given to the Hungry Club in Pittsburgh is very appropriate today. It should be required reading in history classes.
Ron