Difficult as it would be for one to realize it who took up for the first time the present tariffs of the United States, they rest on a formula which as it always has been understood by the majority of the people of the country is not especially intricate or confusing. Put yourself back a hundred years or so, when the country was busy with agriculture and commerce and mining. We had an enormous advantage in these pursuits. We were at a disadvantage in manufacturing. To be sure, from the start we did a little. In the nature of things we would gradually do more, and what we did would be on a solid basis. But, obviously, only the born iron-master, potter, weaver, was going to practise his trade in the new country with the foreigner importing goods cheaper than he as a rule could make them. And so we decided to encourage manufacturing by taxing ourselves. The amount of the tax decided on was to be only enough to put our would-be manufacturers on an even basis with the foreigner. This meant what? By general consent, it meant giving our people enough to cover the difference in the cost of labor. Plainly, Americans were not going to work for the same wages that Europeans did. There were too many ways in which they could earn more. The country was new, and men could have land of their own on easy terms. Commerce called them; for, having land, we were raising foods, and Europe and the Orient, worn and old and privilege-ridden, 332were crying for food. They could make everything we wanted, cheap as dirt. They were eager to exchange. If we were to do our own manufacturing, we were obliged to devise a scheme which would make the wages of operatives approximately equal to those which could be earned in our natural occupations. Thus protection was not adopted for the sake of producing generous wages for labor. It was adopted because the rewards to labor in the new country were already generous and promised to be more so.
There is another equally important point to remember, and that is that it was expressly understood that the duty was never to be prohibitive. It was to be one that would permit the man at home to compete with the man from abroad; no more. Sensible people have always agreed that we would injure ourselves if we allowed prohibitive duties, since they would cut us off from the stimulus of competition and also from models.
The old countries had been for centuries making the goods we wanted. They knew how to do it. We needed constantly before us in our markets the educational effect of their work.
There were few, if any, at the start to deny that this taxing of ourselves to establish industries was dangerous business, undemocratic, of course—probably unconstitutional—and an obvious bait to the greedy; but they comforted themselves with the gains which they believed would speedily result. The list was tempting:
1. We were to build up industries which would supply our own needs.
2. The laborers attracted into these industries were to make a larger home market.
3. We were soon to out-rival the foreigner in cost of production, giving the people in return for the tax they had borne cheaper goods than ever the Old World could give.
3334. We were to outstrip the Old World in quality and variety—another reward for taxation patiently borne.
5. We were to over-produce and with our surplus enter the markets of the world.
Nobody pretended to deny that if it was found on fair experiment that these results were impossible in a particular industry the protection must be withdrawn. Otherwise it amounted to supporting an industry at public expense—an unbusinesslike, unfair, and certainly undemocratic performance.
But what has happened when the formula has not worked? Take the failure after decades of costly experiments to grow all the wool we use, to make woollens of as high a quality and at a price equal to those of the English. Fully sixty per cent of the raw wool used in the United States is brought from other lands, and a tax of 11 or 12 cents is collected on every pound of it. Our high grade woollens cost on an average twice what they do in Europe. The fact is, the protective dogma has not, and probably never can, make good in wools and woollens. It is one of those cases where we can use land, time, labor, and money to better advantage. The doctrine of protection as well as common humanity and common-sense orders the gradual but steady wiping out of all duties on everything necessary to the health and comfort of the people unless in a reasonable time these duties can supply us better and cheaper goods than we can buy in the world market. That time was passed at least twenty years ago in wool, but Schedule K still stands. It is supported by an interpretation of the formula of protection, which, as one picks it out to-day, from the explanations and practices of the wool-growers and wool manufacturers, is only a battered wreck of its old self. It ignores utterly the time limit, the “reasonable” period in which an industry was to make good. It ignores the condition 334that the duty should not destroy fair competition. Moreover, it stretches the function of the duty from that of temporarily protecting the cost of production to one of permanently insuring profits. The chief appeal of those who employ this distorted notion is not to reason at all, but to sympathy—sympathy for the American working-man. Call their attention to the inequalities of the duties on raw wool, and they will tell you of the difference in the labor cost of dress goods here and in England. Tell them the quality of our goods is deteriorating, and they will draw you a picture of the blessings of the American working-man. Tell them that the wool schedule has taken blankets and woollen garments from the sufferers from tuberculosis, who certainly need them, and they will tell you that “the American people are better clothed than any other people in the world and their clothes are better made.” The chief capital of the stand-pat protectionist is some variation of this appeal. The hearings preparatory to the Payne-Aldrich Bill were stuffed with them, and they were used in reply to every conceivable argument. For instance, the head of what is called the “file trust” was on the stand. It had been shown that the gentleman was selling files abroad much cheaper than at home, that he had a practically prohibitive duty, one which had reduced imports to about one per cent of the file consumption in the United States. It was also certain from his testimony that his laborers could not be getting a very large share of the duty. “Do you not think,” the chairman asked him, “that if the tariff is laid in the name of labor, labor ought to get the tariff?” Here is the answer he received:
“If you will pardon me for expressing one little thought, I will say that I walked down this morning from the Willard, and saw a pair of horses, a beautiful cart all equipped with fruit, vegetables, and one thing and another. I can close my eyes and 335see that condition over on the continent of Europe, with barefooted women in rags, with a few Newfoundland dogs, or some other kind of dogs, hitched up with a string harness to the cart, and a few vegetables, that they are pulling around.”
There is no reason to doubt that the gentleman saw on Pennsylvania Avenue the prosperous cart he described. There is no doubt he might have found on the continent of Europe his “barefooted woman in rags.” But if he had crossed over to the Washington market, he would have found on its outskirts numbers of men and women, some of them white-haired, who have brought in that morning from great distances out of Washington on their backs or behind tottering mules, pitiful handfuls of field flowers, wild roots, and perhaps a bunch or two of garden stuff, quite as pathetic a spectacle as the pathetic one with which he was trying to befuddle the Ways and Means Committee. All over Europe he will find as prosperous vegetable carts as those he saw in Washington—all over the United States on the outskirts of the cities he will find, if he will look, women picking up coal and bits of wood along the tracks of railroads and in the yards of factories, and see them carrying their pickings home on their backs. The gentleman indeed will rarely enter or leave an American city on a railroad that he will not see something of this kind.
Any one who has observed the life of the working-man on both sides of the Atlantic knows that wages, conditions, opportunities, are vastly superior as a whole in the United States. It is a New World, with a New World’s hopes. But it is only the blind and deaf who do not realize that the same forces of allied greed and privilege which have made life so hard for so many in the Old World are at work, seeking to repeat here what they have done there. The favorite device of those who are engaged in this attempt is picturing the 336contrast between the most favored labor of the United States, and the least favored of Europe. It is a device which “Pig Iron” Kelley used throughout his career with utter disregard of facts. Mr. McKinley followed him. In the course of his defence of the tin plate duty he read, with that incredible satisfaction which the prohibitive protectionist takes in the thought that his policy may cripple the industry of another nation, an English view of the effect the proposed duty would have in Wales. “The great obstacle to tin plate making on a large scale in the states,” said the article, “is the entire absence of cheap female labor.” Mr. McKinley paused and said impressively, “We do not have cheap female labor here under the protective system, I thank God for that.” And yet at that moment in the textile mills of New England, of New York, and of Pennsylvania, not only were thousands of women working ten, eleven, and more hours a day, because their labor was cheap, but thousands of children under twelve years of age were doing the same.
The “American working-man” has long been the final argument in every tariff defence, the last word which routed both statistics and common-sense. This was Mr. Aldrich’s clincher when he worked so hard in 1909 to continue or to increase the duties of the Dingley Bill. “Protective duties are levied for the benefit of giving employment to the industries of Americans, to our people in the United States and not to foreigners,” he said, and reiterated in a variety of ways. But take Mr. Aldrich’s own tariff-made state and examine in detail the experiences of its laborers. Rhode Island is one of the most perfect object lessons in the effects of high tariffs in this or any land. An object-lesson should not be overlarge. It should be something you can see, can walk over if you will. Rhode Island satisfies this condition perfectly. In the matter of the protective tariff Rhode Island is the more useful 337as an object-lesson because she was a well-developed state when the system was applied to her. She had at the beginning of the nineteenth century flourishing farms and some 40,000 sheep. She was exporting annually between two and three millions of agricultural products. She was building many ships, and from her fine ports carrying on a varied and lively trade with other lands. She was well advanced for the time in manufacturing. Long before the Revolution, Rhode Island’s iron foundries turned out cannon and firearms, anchors and bells and all sorts of small wares. When the cotton factory came—and she had the first in the country, the Slater factory of Pawtucket, she was able to make her own cotton machinery. In the manufacture of woollen cloth, she took a prominent place from the start.
It was then to an all-around development that our policy of high protection was applied in this particular state. Under its stimulus her manufactories have multiplied and enlarged in a truly magnificent fashion. The story of this development cannot be told here, but like all stories of rapid growth it excites and dazzles. The results are sufficient for the present purpose. In 1909 the manufacturing plants of Rhode Island turned out goods worth $279,438,000—about $375 for each man, woman, and child in the state. But while she has been making things to sell at this prodigious rate, she has ceased entirely to build ships and send men to sea to trade. That is, while high duties were stimulating mightily the making of all that went into ships, they were making the ships so costly to buy that nobody could afford them. Rhode Island had her factories, and part of the price paid was her ships—her ships and her farms, for her farms steadily and surely went to pieces. To-day she has not over 4000 sheep, one-tenth of what she raised fifty years ago. Between 1880 and 1900 the improved land decreased by 17 per cent. She 338is practically dependent on the world outside for food. She buys her apples on the Pacific coast, her flour in the Mississippi Valley, and her meat from the Beef Trust.
But what has the tariff to do with the neglect of the Rhode Island farm? Everything. A farm is a family affair as no other industry is. It yields its best only when it passes down from generation to generation. Tenants, however faithful, are not sufficient. It demands its own, and in Rhode Island its own has deserted the farm for the factory. Quick fortunes seemed to lie that way. It seemed to demand neither the patience nor the drudgery; it was ready money at least, and the young men and women left the farms to the old people, and the old people died. Those who followed them were but dregs of the old communities—the shiftless, the weak, the ignorant, and the unambitious. The farm yearly dropped back and it lies to-day a forlorn and unkempt relic of its old self.
All Rhode Island then flocked to manufacturing, until to-day the one thing in the state which sticks out above everything else is the factory. It is the factory in which capital is invested and from which dividends are drawn. It is the factory which employs the population. It has been estimated that three-fourths of the people are dependent upon the textile mills alone. The great body of breadwinners in Rhode Island not directly connected with the textile trades is busy administering to the wants of the textile workers. Further, that portion of the population which does not belong to these industries is dependent upon other highly protected industries: on rubber, with its duty of 35 per cent, on machinery (45 per cent), on cheap jewellery (87 per cent), on silver and gold wares (60 per cent). That is, Rhode Island to-day is a tariff-made state, and as such should offer us ample material for an easy analysis of what the American system of protection, given full encouragement, does for a community.
339As we have seen, it concentrates effort on one line, putting an end to agriculture and commerce. But this may not be a bad thing. If a state grows richer by specialization, is it not wiser to specialize? That of course depends upon how generally the fruits of the process are distributed, how greatly the condition of the mass is elevated, how much its happiness and health are improved. In a tariff-made state as in another the success of the system depends upon what the people at large are getting out of it; that is, what does it do for the American working-man? The first feature of the textile industry in Rhode Island which strikes even a casual observer is that the operatives are not Americans; they are distinctly foreigners—new-come foreigners. Less than 16 per cent of them, as a matter of fact, are born of what the industrial authority of the state calls “United States fathers,” the other 85 per cent are in percentages decreasing in order of their naming here: French Canadians, Irish, English, Italians, Germans, Scotch, Portuguese, Poles, and Russians, besides a considerable number classed under “other countries.” We have the surprising fact then that, as far as the benefits of the textile tariffs are concerned in Rhode Island, if the laborer gets them, it is a foreign laborer.
A second surprise awaits the student of these Rhode Island laborers blessed by protection. They are an unstable quantity. They must be constantly replaced. The “benefits” do not hold them. The success of the overseer in the textile factory has come to be judged largely by his ability to “hold labor.” One of the interesting proofs of the restlessness of the operatives is the small percentage of people in the state who own their own homes. A recent careful investigation into the housing conditions of the state shows that farm-houses aside, 75 per cent of Rhode Island’s population live in rented houses. That is, in one of the first settled states of 340the union, one of the most advantageously situated, one offering the best opportunities for diversified occupations, one of the richest in its per capita product and bank deposits, only a fourth of the people live in houses which they own.
But why should the laborers in an industry which the people of the United States pay so handsomely to support be restless? Why in these seventy years and more of continued and constantly increasing protection have they not become a stable, settled, home-owning body of American workmen? Surely that is what we have been taught to believe the tariff would do. The answer to a question of this nature is always complicated. Nevertheless, in this case it is answered fairly well by a review of the conditions under which the textile operative works, the wages he receives, and the money he must expend to live.
Under the most perfect conditions yet devised the making of cotton and woollen cloth is hard and wearing labor. Under the conditions too general in Rhode Island it is exhausting and dangerous. The very atmosphere in which the work goes on is against the operative. The temperature throughout the factory runs high—80°, 90°, 100°, even, is not unusual. The work does not require this; the factory laws of England forbid the excessive temperature in which much of Rhode Island’s spinning and weaving is done. Worse than the high temperature is the degree of humidity which prevails. Without a certain moisture in the air the “work does not go well.” The result is a good deal of the time an atmosphere as oppressive as that which Washington and Philadelphia suffer in summer time. The ventilation in most of the factories is insufficient, and as any draft is bad for the work the windows are usually closed from end to end of the great barracks. A half hour in the atmosphere of a factory is sufficient to throw one unaccustomed to it into a steaming 341perspiration. The operative usually ends the day’s work in wet clothes.
Then there is the cotton lint, or “fly,” as it is called, which literally fills the air. It is no unusual thing to find the air around the factory for a hundred or more feet literally alive with cotton shreds. There are contrivances for carrying off a certain amount of this dust, but there are few Rhode Island factories which have installed them, and there is no one in which, so far as I know, any energetic and scientific efforts are making to solve the terrible problem. For terrible it is. Breathe a cotton-saturated air, a damp, hot air at that, for ten hours a day and consider the condition in which lungs and throat will be.
Now these are conditions natural to the making of cotton and woollen cloths, conditions which can never be entirely corrected. They are hard and wearing, but they become dangerous in the extreme when combined with certain other conditions not incident to the industry, due entirely to the ignorance or the greed or the indifference of factory owners.
It is hard to believe that men who ask other men and women and children to labor ten hours a day in a dripping heat and an atmosphere alive with cotton and wool particles will be slow to furnish them abundant supplies of pure flowing drinking water; but a bucket or barrel filled from some outside source is frequently all that is furnished a floor of workers.
It is difficult to believe that factory owners would not be eager to see that these workers of theirs were furnished with comfortably heated toilet rooms, with every sanitary appliance; but all up and down the Pawtucket River one finds factories with toilets that cannot by any stretch of words be called respectable.
When the day’s work is done the textile operative rarely 342has a comfortable cloak or dressing room in which to prepare for the street. If it were merely the matter of putting on a hat and coat, this would not be serious. But part at least of the clothes ought to be changed before going out. The heat, moisture, and dust under which he has worked for ten hours make it unsafe to go suddenly into the open air without dry garments. In cold weather a chill or shock is almost inevitable. But it is rare that the factory provides a dressing room. The result is that bronchitis and pneumonia are always attacking textile operatives, weakening lungs and throat and fitting the system for the white plague, which hangs like a perpetual shadow over a textile community.
Now for fifty-eight hours of labor a week under these conditions what do they earn? How well equipped are their pockets to fight the exhaustion, the threatening diseases which are incident to their labor? To avoid exaggeration accept the figures for 1907, one of the occasional boom years which cotton and woollen manufacturers have enjoyed in this country. The average weekly earnings for 58 hours in cotton factories in that year were: For the carding room $7.80, for mule spinners $12.92, for speeders $10.62, for weavers $10.38. In the woollen industry the picker received $8.00, the woman spinner $7.25, the man spinner $12.91, the weavers $15.34.
If a man could make these wages for fifty-two weeks a year throughout his working life, if he had a thrifty wife and healthy children, his lot, if not altogether rosy, would be far from hopeless; he might even be able to realize the dream of a little home and garden of his own which lurks in the mind of every normal man, and which in the case of the textile operative is almost imperative if he is to have a decent and independent old age. For this man, however husky he may be at the start, however skilful a laborer, has always a short working life. There are few old men and women in textile 343factories. By 55 they are unfit for the labor. The terrible strain on brain and nerve and muscle has so destroyed the agility and power of attention necessary that they must give up the factory, where, indeed, for several years their output has probably been gradually decreasing. As almost all textile operatives are paid by the piece the wage will gradually fall off as dexterity declines. By 55, then, if not earlier, he drops out, picking up thereafter any odd job he may.
It is this short working life of the father, with the declining wage for years before it actually ends, that makes child labor an essential factor in the solving of the problem of the textile family. Without the help of the child the father cannot support the family and lay aside enough to insure his own and his wife’s future. His wage, and the wear and tear he suffers, make it impossible. The child must help.
If the children prove healthy, if they “turn out well,” if work is continuous, the little home may be secured and the modest little dream may come true. But suppose that a weaver, rushing into the cold air at the end of his ten-hour day, is chilled and has pneumonia—it happens often enough. Suppose an uncovered gear or belt catches him in an incautious moment and crushes a limb or takes his scalp, or a carelessly handled machine nips off a finger—it happens all the time. Carelessness? More often it is that the limit of human endurance has been passed. Fatigue has ceased to be normal and has become abnormal—his mind is dulled—his nerve deadened—his muscles do not respond. The wonder is that in the shrieking, devilish uproar of the factory, a tired man can keep up his habit of caution as steadily as most of them do. Suppose that, standing through the hot summer in the poisoned air of a dry closet, he falls ill of a fever. Or, if he escapes all these things, suppose that the factory goes on short time—thousands of operatives all over New England have 344had their weekly wages cut in half in the last three years by short time. Or, suppose that, which has happened repeatedly in Rhode Island, he is obliged by some intolerable condition to strike and have no wage—what happens then? That happens which is more disastrous to the family than even child labor—the wife must go into the factory. So narrow is the margin in the best of times that an illness, a shut down, disturbs the budget so that only the combined exertion of all the members of the family can save it. The mothers go into the factory, and the homes gradually go to pieces. After her ten hours at spindle or loom the woman hurries to a cold, unkempt house, which she must make comfortable and cheerful if it is to be so. Is it strange that the homes of the factory mothers are generally untidy, the food poor, the children neglected? How can it be otherwise? Her limit of endurance, of ambition, of joy, even of desire of life, has been passed. More appalling, she sees her ability to work falling off. Almost universally, women who have worked ten years in a factory have the patent-medicine habit—they are “so tired” they “take something.” Is it surprising that a few of them finally discover that they can get from beer or whiskey the same temporary strength at less cost? The surprise is not that many drink, but that more do not.
Now the hope of this factory mother lies in her child, since she, like her husband, is bound to wear out at a comparatively early age. And what chance has she to bear a healthy child? They give you heartbreaking figures of infant mortality in Rhode Island, and everywhere one goes what one sees and hears confirms their truthfulness. The district nurses talk to you of “bottle babies,” the factory mother being, as a rule, so poorly nourished and so overworked that she cannot nurse her child. Moreover, she cannot care for it. She must return as soon as possible to the factory. The doctor’s bill 345is heavy. “He” is having a hard time, the mill is running short. The baby is left to an older child if there be one, or, if there is none, it perhaps goes to one of the human institutions of the factory town—the “old woman.” The old woman may not be over 50, but the factory has got all it can out of her and the factory community utilizes her by giving her its young children to care for, paying perhaps $2.00 a week. The old woman may have borne children, but she has never had an opportunity to learn to care for them properly. She is often so deaf she cannot hear them cry and she is too poor to buy them proper food, and to boot, she may be a tippler. Unless husky beyond all probability, or saved by some lucky chance—a district nurse or a sister or some other good angel—the baby dies. One should go to the cemetery to see how many die. There is nothing more pitiful in all this beautiful world than the interminable rows of little graves in the cemeteries of the factory towns.
In recent years the problems of the operative have been complicated by the soaring cost of living. Almost everything he buys is higher in price, or if he insists on a standard price, the article is poorer in quality. Take the very protected articles from which Rhode Island draws her wealth. All these 68,000 textile workers must have clothes. The price of women’s all-wool dress goods increased in Providence, the centre of the industry between 1891 and 1907, over 33 per cent. There was an increase in practically all the cotton-warp goods varying from 4 to 40 per cent. Underwear in which there was any mixture of wool cost a fourth more in 1907 than sixteen years before. Cotton underwear was reported as stationary in price, though since 1907 it has risen. Bleached muslin used for shirtings was 34 per cent dearer in 1907 than in 1891. Cotton thread was 10 per cent dearer. All linens were higher, though of course the textile operatives 346cannot buy much linen. That is, their own industries are taking out of them the increase in wages which this same period has seen!
Are not the conditions so hastily sketched a fairly satisfactory answer to the question with which we started out: Why should not Rhode Island have a stable, settled, home-owning body of American workmen? The hazards are so great, the wage so low, the work so uncertain, that the American workman or the foreigner, after a few years of experience here, will not remain if he can get out. He realizes that the chances are against the operative getting on in the world. What this means is that it is not he who is getting the benefits of the protective duties which Mr. Aldrich says are laid for “our people in the United States.” He is barely getting a living, and getting it under conditions which make life to himself, his wife, and children a constant menace. The tax we pay on textiles never gets beyond the stockholders, who in Rhode Island are usually a family that for generations have run their mills and absorbed the profits—absorbed them so quietly, too, that one knows nothing of what they are save by the deceiving outward signs.
Not only has the average factory owner absorbed the lion’s share of the profits, but he set his face like a flint against spending a cent of the protection he enjoys in humane efforts to make the industry more tolerable. This man, who periodically appears as a suppliant before Congress, praying for a continuation of benefits which cost this whole people dearly, will not, unless driven to it by law and outraged public opinion, protect even the children who work in his mills. It took the hard-fought labor wars of the ’80’s to force from the legislature of the state (then as now held in the hollow of the hands of men who live by the beneficence of this people) a ten-hour law for children, a twelve-year age limit, and proper 347truant laws. But, the laws passed, no authorities were ever found to enforce them, for the very sufficient reason that all authorities in Rhode Island lived by permission of the mill owners. A Bureau of Industrial Statistics for gathering information and a factory inspector to report on the observance of the laws which labor unions and social agencies had forced from the legislature were finally secured. The first set of inquiries sent out by the Industrial Bureau was treated with contempt by the manufacturers, the Slater Club deciding what questions it would and would not answer!
According to the first of the reports issued only one corporation in the state had its sinks properly trapped, and fever was epidemic. The factories almost invariably were fire-traps, wooden structures with low ceilings, no escapes, and often with heavy wire screens nailed over the windows. The laws governing child labor were generally ignored. And all this was only about twenty years ago. Many improvements have been made since then, but they have been made too often in the face of the open or badly concealed opposition of the average manufacturer, rarely with his sympathetic co?peration. When men refuse co?peration with laws which concern the health and happiness of those whose labor makes their wealth possible, it is because of a stunted social sense. There are other shocking proofs of this defective development in the average Rhode Island textile manufacturer than his attitude toward humane legislation. One of them is the housing of operatives.
Stories of foul, neglected tenements in Rhode Island factory towns, drawn from recent investigation, could be multiplied. They are another of the many good............