I felt after the bill of 1909 that there was nothing for an outsider like me to do but wait for that revolution.
I felt this so deeply that when President Wilson invited me to be a member of the Tariff Commission he formed in December, 1916, I refused. I was pleased, of course, that Mr. Wilson thought me fit for such a place. I knew that I should find the associations interesting. The dean of tariff students in the United States—Dr. Taussig of Harvard—was the chairman. To be under him would be an education that would be worth the taking, but I did not hesitate.
First, there was my personal situation—my obligations. I had no right to give up my profession for a connection of that sort, in its nature temporary. Then I realized my own unfitness as Mr. Wilson could not. I had had no experience in the kind of work this required. I was an observer and reporter, not a negotiator. I am not a good fighter in a group; I forget my duty in watching the contestants. But primarily there was my hopelessness about the service the Tariff Commission might render. Its researches and its conclusions, however sound, would stand no chance in Congress when a wool or iron and steel or sugar lobby appeared. A Tariff Commission was hamstrung from the start.
Of course it was not only my interest and work on the tariff that had led Mr. Wilson to offer me the position. He was looking about for women to whom he could give recognition. He was an outspoken advocate of suffrage and wanted to use women when he thought them qualified.
Jane Addams pleaded with me to accept “for the sake of women,” but I did not feel that women were served merely by an appointment to office. Women, like men, serve in proportion to their fitness for office, to the actual fact they have something to contribute. I had no enthusiasm for the task, did not even respect it greatly. I believed, too, that harm is done all around by undertaking technical jobs without proper scientific training. The cause of women is not to be advanced by putting them into positions for which they are untrained.
The press comments on the idea of a woman on this commission were not unfriendly, as far as I saw them; but they were a little surprised and, as I was to find later, protests were made to Mr. Wilson. My friend Ray Stannard Baker, working on the Wilson papers, came across an answer of the President on December 27, 1916, to one protesting gentleman which I am not too modest to print:
As a matter of fact, she has written more good sense, good plain common sense, about the tariff than any man I know of, and is a student of industrial conditions in this country of the most serious and sensible sort.
14 THE GOLDEN RULE IN INDUSTRY
I was done with the tariff, but it was out of the tariff that my next serial came—born partly of a guilty conscience! In attempting to prove that in certain highly protected industries only a small part of a duty laid in the interest of labor went to labor, I had taken satisfaction in picturing the worst conditions I could find, badly ventilated and dangerous factories, unsanitary homes, underfed children. But in looking for this material I found, in both protected and unprotected industries, substantial and important efforts making to improve conditions, raise wages, shorten hours, humanize relations.
My conscience began to trouble me. Was it not as much my business as a reporter to present this side of the picture as to present the other? If there were leaders in practically every industry who regarded it not only as sound ethics but as sound economics to improve the lot of the worker, ought not the public to be familiarized with this belief?
At that moment, and indeed for a good many years, the public had heard little except of the atrocities of industrial life. By emphasizing, the reformers had hoped to hasten changes they sought. The public was coming to believe that the inevitable result of corporate industrial management was exploitation, neglect, bullying, crushing of labor, that the only hope was in destroying the system.
But if the practices were not universal, if there was a steady, though slow, progress, ought not the public to recognize it? Was it not the duty of those who were called muckrakers to rake up the good earth as well as the noxious? Was there not as much driving force in a good example as in an evil one?
The office was not unfriendly to the idea. As a matter of fact _The American Magazine_ had little genuine muckraking spirit. It did have a large and fighting interest in fair play; it sought to present things as they were, not as somebody thought they ought to be. We were journalists, not propagandists; and as journalists we sought new angles on old subjects. The idea that there was something fundamentally sound and good in industrial relations, that in many spots had gone far beyond what either labor or reformers were demanding, came to the office as a new attack on the old problem. Mr. Phillips, always keenly aware of the new and significant, had his eye on the movement, I found, and was willing to commission me to go out and see what I could find.
This was in 1912, and for the next four years I spent the bulk of my time in factories and industrial towns. The work took me from Maine to Alabama, from New York to Kansas. I found my material in all sorts of industries: iron and steel in and around Pittsburgh, Chicago, Duluth; mines in West Virginia, Illinois, and Wisconsin; paper boxes and books and newspapers everywhere; candy in Philadelphia; beer and tanneries and woodwork in Wisconsin; shirts and collars and shoes in New York and Massachusetts. I watched numberless things in the making: turbines and optical lenses, jewelry and mesh bags, kodaks and pocketknives, plated cutlery and solid silver tea services, Minton tableware and American Belleek, cans and ironware, linen tablecloths and sails for a cup defender, furniture I suspected was to be sold in Europe for antiques, and bric-a-brac I knew was to be sold in America as Chinese importations, railroad rails and wire for a thousand purposes, hookless fasteners and mechanical toys. I seemed never to tire of seeing things made. But do not ask me now how they were made!
I never counted the number of factories I visited. Looking at the volume in which I finally gathered my findings, I find there are some fifty-five major concerns mentioned; but these were those which in my judgment best illustrated the particular point I was trying to make. There were many more.
My visits had to be arranged beforehand. I took pains to make sure of my credentials, but I soon discovered that my past work served me well. The heads of the industries and many workmen were magazine readers, liked to talk about writers and asked all sorts of curious questions about men and women they had become acquainted with in _McClure’s_ and the _American_: Kipling, Baker, Steffens, Will White, Edna Ferber, just coming on at that time. There was often considerable asperity at the top when I presented my letters of introduction. They set me down as an enemy of business; but again and again this asperity was softened by a man’s love of Abraham Lincoln. He had a habit of reading everything about Lincoln that he could put his hands on, collected books, brought out my “Life” to be autographed. That is, while I was _persona non grata_ for one piece of work, another piece softened suspicion and opened doors to me.
My first move in a factory was to study the processes of the particular industry. Machines were not devils to me as they were to some of my reforming friends, particularly that splendid old warrior Florence Kelley, then in the thick of her fight for “ethical gains through legislation.” To me machines freed from heavy labor, created abundance. That is, I started out free of the inhibition that hate of a machine puts on many observers. I think because of this I was better able to judge the character of a factory, to see its weak as well as its good points. I was able to understand what the enemy of the machine rarely admits: that men and women who have arrived at the dignity of steady workers not only respect, but frequently take pride in, their machines.
Again, I gave myself time around these factories. The observer who once in his life goes down for half a day into a mine or spends two or three hours walking through a steel mill, naturally revolts against the darkness, the clatter, the smoke, the danger. As a rule he misses the points of real hardship; he also misses the satisfactions. As my pilgrimage lengthened, I became more and more convinced that there is no trade which has not its devotee.
“Once a miner, always a miner.” “Once a sailor, always a sailor.” One might go through the whole category.
“Why,” I now and then asked miners, “do you stay by the mine?”
“I was brought up to it.” “I like it.” “Nobody bothers you when you are working with a pick.” “Nice and quiet in the mines.”
“But the danger!”