How they lived in Hampton: a study of practical Christianity applied in the manufacture of woollens

Front matter

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

APPLIED IN THE MANUFACTURE OF WOOLLENS.

Preface

The author supposes that this Essay on the Christian relations of the capitalist and the workman will be more generally read if it is presented in narrative form.

It is proper to say that the details bearing on the business of manufacture have the authority of a well-known and successful manufacturer of woollens.

I am myself the person who was invited, in 1873, by the proprietors of three different woollen mills, to take them and carry them on on the plan proposed. I received these invitations because I had blocked out this plan, or rather a manufacturer of large experience had blocked it out for me, in a story which I published at that time in Harper's Magazine, called "Back to Back."

IV PREFACE.

Unfortunately for me, I was not trained to the woollen manufacture, and could not take, therefore, the difficult part which Mr. Spinner takes in this book, as Max Rising took it in that. I was therefore obliged to decline the three proposals. But in this book, as the reader will see, I have supposed that Mr. Spinner accepted one.

EDWARD E. HALE.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. How they Lived at Hampton .... i

II. The Plan 24

Chapter I. How They Lived At Hampton

HAMPTON was a little factory town where was one woollen mill, which represented an investment of perhaps sixty thousand dollars. The village was pretty, — a little more four-square and set in its plan than I should have made it, — but with evident arrangements of comfort for the workingmen and workingwomen. Lines of maples, about twenty years old, or rather less, shaded the streets, growing perhaps a little too near the fronts of the houses. The houses were not in blocks. They were separate from each other, and each house had the command, if I may so speak, of as much as an acre of land, as a home garden. I noticed, as I walked about the village and pushed my explorations into the back streets, that, in many instances, the lots connected with back lots, so that these gardens were considerably more than an acre. The mill was just off the village street, built close to the Beaver Brook, which was dammed up to make the waterfall which provided power. A church, a town hall, and a schoolhouse faced three sides of a little public square, which was planted with trees and flowers, in the midst of which there was a fountain. I noticed a stand for a band on one side of the square.

I had been following Beaver Brook, and what the geography would call its tributaries, far up into the woods and hills, and had returned to a late dinner, with a basket of trout quite as heavy as I cared to carry. The plan had been that we were to drive down the valley after dinner, and see what was to be seen of a certain mound in the fork of the river and brook, which either was or was not built by the Aztecs, or by Chippewas, or some other Indian tribes, and regarding which we were to form an opinion while we spent a pleasant afternoon. But the appearance in the west of black clouds, which made a thunder storm certain, broke up these plans for a drive, and so I found myself sitting with Mr. Spinner, my host, on the broad eastern piazza, with the chance for a long talk, which business, amusement, or the interruption of guests had not permitted during my visit.

"Now you can tell me," said I, "how you came here, what you did first, and what you did last, why you did it, and where you did it, when you failed, and when you succeeded. "

Spinner laughed. "I am. not a story-teller," said he, " and I shall be apt to put the cart before the horse. The story will fail in what the magazines call artistic or aesthetic grouping or arrangement. But if you put me on my hobby, I shall ride him, and you will have to see his paces."

I said I wanted nothing better.

" I like to tell the story," he said. " I have seen it all, — I and Nancy here, — and we have been a good deal of it. But we should not have done what we have, nor would you see what you see here, but for the loyal help of the people here ; no, nor if, on the whole, the country had not been behind us. At bottom, John, this is a country of workingmen. The wealth in the hands of a few rich men is easily seen and easily talked of. But, for all that, the amount in the pockets of the People — the People with a large P, as that man said in his speech — is vastly more than the amount at the bank accounts of a few nabobs. Indeed, I often think of that phrase of Quincy's, that the servant-girls of Boston owned the palaces on their Back Bay. He meant that the servant-girls made the deposits in the savings banks, which enabled them to lend to the palace-builders all the money they wanted.

"So the country sympathizes with industry, with contrivance, with work. That sympathy shows itself in law, — well in fashion, though the newspapers do not think so, — in public sentiment. And this makes, oh, Freeman, it makes no end of difference. I would not run a mill in Mexico, — not if you would give me forty-five ingots of silver to build into the foundation. Nay ; when I remember how I heard a Manchester woman from England once, in a New Hampshire valley, hold up her hands to heaven and invoke its ' curse on them that built the chimbleys which shut out God's light,' from her old home, in the England she had deserted ; when I heard that, I was glad I was not making cloth in England. I like to work where I have 'the country behind me.' "

Then Spinner asked me if I remembered where we had heard that phrase. I did remember it very well. Captain Greely had given an account, intensely exciting, of his Arctic adventures. And he told us how he encouraged the men by telling them that they had "the country behind them."

"Well," said Spinner, as he picked up the thread of his history, and as little Mary Spinner brought me a Bartlett pear and a fruit-knife,

"to begin at the beginning, we began when everything was horribly depressed. I suppose that is a good time to begin. If the sand and gravel has been swept off the rock, you have a clean underpinning. You can build on the rock, and no mistake, and for that there is good Scripture. It was in the autumn of 1874. I had been the foreman in the dyeing-room — head-dyer I was called — in the Andalusia Mills, at Groton. Perhaps you remember how high up they went," he said, rather grimly, " higher than a kite. The selling agent knew as much about wool as I know about quaternions. He chose to buy our wool, as well as to sell our goods. He left the business mostly to his sons, who knew more of billiards than I know of teazles. And the upshot of it all was that there was that first-rate smash-up. Stockholders and all were mad. Andalusia Mills were sold under the hammer to some Germans, and they brought in their own people to run them, if and when they opened again. So I and Nancy here, with our two babies, were left out in the cold.

" Meanwhile the country was drugged or flooded, or whatever you call it, with every sort of woollen goods. And it did seem as if the man was a fool who made any more.

"Just at that time I met at some sort of a committee meeting our old friend Thankful

Nourse ; we were both trustees of a workingman's building fund. I walked home with Nourse, and, well, yes, I told him a few bottom truths on the subject of investment. He had been in the Andalusia, and now had the pleasure of seeing the same stock quoted at '35, no buyers,' for which his father had given two or three hundred a share.

"I told Nourse that it was just what the Scripture said. He had had his good things, and now he had his evil things. I told him that if he had known how to manufacture woollens, and had chosen to use his knowledge, he would have saved much of his investment.

"'Instead of which,' I said, 'you chose to go to the Islands of Greece, and up the Nile, and across the desert to Damascus, and you left the business of manufacturing to some people who knew nothing about it.' Nourse answered, rather grimly and gloomily, that he knew that very well, quite as well as I did, and that he did not come to have his memory refreshed.

"'No,' I said, 'I did not mean to annoy you. But I meant to say this, that there are two different rates by which capital ought to be paid. One is the rate by which I am paid for my money when I do not take care of it, and take no risks. This is a much lower rate than the

HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. J

rate to be paid me when I take care of it myself, and when I do take some risk.'

" ' Of course,' Nourse says ; ' every one agrees to that.'

" Yes, every one agrees to that. But I have not found that all people agree to what follows. Yet I think it is clear. It is not very hard, in any country, to find out about what capital is worth (say) for idiots or fools of any sort, or for people who do not want to take care of their money, if they knew how. It is clear enough that the long government loans, such loans as the English consols, represent the minimum rate of interest. An idiot or his guardian would be sure of his interest. He takes no care of the investment, but his investment is sure. And I went on to say that while Nourse was going up the Nile, or was crossing the desert, or even if he had a paralytic stroke which lasted seventeen years, the Andalusia people ought to have paid him at that rate of interest, and that he had, indeed, in equity, an absolute right to it.

"Nourse began to see what I was driving at ; and he said that if that were all capitalists were to have, nobody would ever bother to use money for manufacturing. They would try government bonds and be done with it. 'And you fellows,' said he, ' who are now very willing to take our subscriptions to your stock, would find there was no money to build the mills with, or to buy the first bale of wool.'

" I said I knew that ; and that I did not mean to limit them to that. But I said, that for what followed this minimum rate, they became, to a certain extent, adventurers. What followed was something like a second-mortgage bond, — not so sure in its essence as the first. ' You are entitled,' I said, ' to what we will call the Idiot Rate, — the average rate of " Governments," — though the sky should fall, in bad times or good times. But for after profit, you must take the chances, just as the retailer does, who sells you satinets and broadcloths, — or just as the tailor does, who has pieces of them on his shelves, and cannot sell them. When the Andalusia people paid you that swamping dividend of eleven per cent, six or eight years ago, three per cent or a little more came to you because it was the worth of the money, and nearly eight per cent came to you because that was a good year, and because then you had some intelligent people at the fore.'

"Nourse growled that it was long since he had had any such good fortune, — that he was a fool not to sell out then, and that he never, he hoped, should be such a fool again.

" But I went to see him, the next day, and we followed up the conversation. I told him, that even in the depressed condition of affairs which we were in, there were as good chances as ever for going into the business of making woollen cloths. I said that I did not believe that wearing warm clothes in winter was going out of fashion.

" Nourse said that the tariff might change, and England and Germany might undersell us. He had burned his fingers once, and he would not burn them again, — and so on and so on.

" As for tariffs, I said that the country would long want a large revenue, and was used to gathering it by import duties. I said that the country was really governed by its workingmen, and that they would be slow to injure themselves. And I said that whether there was a high tariff or not, we are an ingenious people, and a numerous people ; that the nearer the mill was to the shop on the one side, and to the man who made the coat on the other, the better was the chance of the man who carried on the mill. Any way, I said, I had been educated to make woollen cloth, that was my profession, and I did not expect to give it up ; that there were hundreds of thousands of Americans as good as I, who had been trained to that profession, and that we had somewhere between forty and fifty million people about us who

IO HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON.

were glad to wear the cloth we had made. He laughed good-naturedly, and said he was glad I was in such good heart. And I reminded him, that however much he had suffered by the Andalusia, I had suffered more.

"But, indeed, those were black times in our business. O ! I cannot tell you how many mills shut down, — all the weak ones, — most of the little ones, — and indeed a good many which no one would ever have called weak until then. It happened that I wrote an article about manufacturing, in a weekly paper, which attracted the attention of some business men, and from that article it was that I received, through the editor's hands, three letters, from three different sets of people, asking me if I did not want to bring to life three different broken-winded woollen mills, in three different parts of the country. One of them was in Ohio ; one of them was in Middlesex, in Massachusetts ; and the third was a mill here in Hampton. I do not say it was this mill, though here is the old sluice-way, the old wheel in fact, and in part the old foundation. But, really, we have changed almost everything, and the village, as you see it, is practically new.

" If I do not tire you, or bore you, I will tell you how it came about."

I said it would not bore me at all ; that, in

HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. II

fact, I had come to Hampton to find out, if I could, the secret of their success, and that the more he liked to tell me, the better I should be pleased. So Spinner began again.

"I do not pretend that I should have launched out into this, if the Andalusia had held on. I had a good salary there, and it was very convenient and very pleasant to draw my pay with the rest, to salt down what I wanted, and to let a strong company behind me take all the risks of the business. I have never wondered that men are so eager to go into positions where they have fixed pay, regularly paid. But the Andalusia had not held on. It had been blown up 'higher than a kite.' I had Nancy and the babies in a world which was full of Thankful Nourses ; I mean, full of men who were afraid of manf uacturing, — that is, were afraid of the very enterprises on which my bread and butter and my babies' milk and spoons depended. That was really the reason why, when the third of these mills was offered me, I began to ask myself whether I had not better face the music ; in fact, whether I must not face the music. The Ohio letter I had answered right away, with a civil refusal. But the Middlesex letter and this Hampton letter came together, by one mail. That interested me, and made me think something might be done, and I sent for John

Workman, and asked him to come and see me.

"No. He is not one of the Worcester Workmans. That is another family. His father came from Maine, and afterwards went to Wisconsin.

" I sent for John Workman, and he came to me. He was out of work, as I knew he was, and I knew that he would know some of the best hands we had had at the Andalusia. The depression of all business was as hard for them as it was for the manufacturers. Well, I had much the same talk with him that I had had with Mr. Nourse, only now I began, so to speak, at the other end. But I told Workman that he and I had our chance now. We had often said that the rate of wages ought to rise with good times, if it was to fall with bad times. But I had three mills offered to me to carry on, and thought I was not without hopes that I could persuade Nourse to give some sinews of war. So I said to Workman that if he could get a lot of men together who were willing to work at minimum wages, but to be so far partners in the concern that if times improved their wages should improve, we had our chance. I told him that the ' bloated capitalists ' were, for once, as badly off as the men who worked with their brains and with their hands, and that for once we had a chance to begin in our own way.

" Now, as I said before, in ordinary times, and especially in prosperous times, this would have been mere talk, and nothing more. But Workman had nothing to do, and he had a family to feed. He knew several of our best friends, as I have said; and they had nothing to do, and they had their families to feed. He brought two or three of them to me, and we had long conversations. It ended in my getting more promises from them, which I was able to carry to Mr. Nourse. They were willing to take hold with me ; I did not say on shares exactly, but really it was much the same way that the fishermen, or in old days the whalers at Nantucket, go, or went, for their enterprises. That is to say, everybody there was to be sure of his rations as far as anything could be sure ; but for the rest, it all depended upon whether our voyage were a good one or not. The men wanted to divide every three months, but I would not agree to this. I said the voyage must last two years before there was a division. They were rather a superior class of men, — they were interested in the plan. They were all running behindhand, and drawing on their bank accounts ; and they finally agreed that our voyage should be a two years' voyage before we made any dividend. That is to say, they agreed to just what Nourse agreed to. All that was to be absolutely promised was a ' starvation payment,' and the rest was to be part of the venture.

" Let me say, by the way, that in any such enterprise you are able to rely on the love of adventure which exists in all men's hearts. Why, Freeman, if you thought it was right, you would like to buy a lottery ticket yourself to-day, and you are really sorry that you know it is wrong.

" As for me, I was between the two, with Workman. We were a sort of buffers, to take all the pounding. We were to be scolded by both sides, and have all the responsibility of everybody's failures. We were to be responsible with the present owners of the mill, whichever way we should take. We were to make the engagement with Nourse, and the engagements with the men. When we were fairly running, if ever we were fairly running, I was to buy the wool, and I was to sell the cloth. I was to make the journeys to New York, and I was to have money enough in the strong-box every Saturday night to pay the starvation wages we had agreed upon, and at the end of every third month to pay Nourse the ' idiot dividend ' on his capital. Workman was to . take the personal oversight of the manufacture, to turn the raw wool into woollen. That is to say, we were to be these hated middle-men whom we had abused so often, and whom we had heard cursed so often. I did not much like to be a middle-man ; but it was very clear that Nourse did not mean to run this mill, but was going off to the Sandwich Islands. And the people who owned it did not mean to run it. If they had meant to, they would not have offered it to me.

" I showed the men's agreement to Nourse, and I got a half-way promise from him that, if I started such a plan, he might put in some money. How much he would put in, I did not know. But on the strength of his promise I drew fifty dollars out of my bank account, and took Workman with me, and we came down to see this place. I can tell you that it did not look much as it does now. It had been badly planned, badly managed, and had come to grief. A poor broken-winded mill at the best ; and when we saw it, it had no wind at all. The people had all gone away except an old man who was keeper, and who had his machinery, such as it was, clean and in good order. But it would evidently take a good deal of money, and I no longer wondered that the people had written to me to offer it to me.

"If you care anything about it, I will show you to-morrow the papers that passed between l6 HOW THEY LIVED IN HAMPTON.

me and them, and I should like to show you some photographs which show what it was when we took hold.

"But, to make a long story short, for Nancy wants us at tea, it ended in my persuading Nourse to buy the whole concern, and for the present to hold the deed. But he took me as partner, and John Workman as another partner ; and we drew out our bank accounts, — I had nearly two thousand dollars then, and Workman had five or six hundred, — so that we might be with him in good faith partners in co-operation. And it was agreed that any man who worked in the mill three months might become a stockholder with us. Indeed, Nourse agreed to sell out all his stock if we chose. We were to allow him four per cent a year, as what we all called in joke the 'idiot's dividend,' which was to be paid as our first charge after we had paid what we called ' starvation wages ' and our other running expenses.

" For the rest, I was to be permitted, for my salary as manager, to draw six hundred dollars a year, as the men drew their wages. Workman was to draw the same. After the end of the second year we were to see where we were. That is to say, the first voyage should then be considered over. Profits, for we took it for granted there would be profits, were then to be

HOW THEY LIVED AT HAMPTON. I J

divided into three equal parts. Nourse was to have one-third ; Workman and I, as managers, were to have one-third ; and the men were to have one-third. Of course, as fast as they bought out Nourse's stock, they also became capitalists, and took their earnings as such. The scheme would work, however, if none of them took any of his share.

" However, you had better see all this on paper, and I will show you the articles of agreement after Nancy has given you a cup of tea.

" When the papers were finally passed I had Workman with me, and he brought with him one of the best of the men who had agreed to try the new plan at Hampton, whose name was Holmes. We had gone all over the business pretty carefully, and I thought Mr. Nourse wanted to get away. But the other two still lingered, and finally Holmes broke the silence, and said : —

" ' I wanted to say to you, Mr. Nourse, and I think Mr. Spinner would like to say the same thing, that we are not going into this thing as a mere matter of business. It is a matter of business, and we will hold to our promise as men of business. But we like the plan really, and we like it because it seems to us to be fair all round. There is a great deal of bad talk — you must excuse me if I say I think it is on all sides — about the relations of what people call labor and capital. For myself, I never called myself a laborer; I always called myself a workman, and I think there is a difference between work and labor. But that is neither here nor there. I, for one, do not want to encourage hard language between men like you, Mr. Nourse, who have money, and men like me, who want to do an honest day's work, who expect to be paid for it, but who do not expect anything more than our pay. I should think that, if you will let me say so, was the Christian way of stating this thing, and though I do not make much pretence as a religious man, I am a member of the church, and I do want to go forward in my everyday work, as I do in what I say on Sunday, on Christian principles. Now, if you do not think I am talking too long, — and my wife often tells me that I do talk too much, — I should like to explain what I mean by Christian principle.'

" Mr. Nourse said, with a great deal of feeling, that he was very much obliged to him ; that he would stay all night to hear what he had to say. For he said he had made this thing a matter of prayer himself, and he wanted to know, if he could, what were the Christian relations which bound him to the men at work in the establishments where he had any interest. He said, very earnestly, that anybody was unjust to him who said he merely wanted to screw out of his money the most that could be got for it ; that he had read and talked and studied, in hope of finding out what these same Christian relations were. He would be very much obliged to Mr. Holmes if he would take all the time he wanted to state his view about it.

" Holmes seemed somewhat encouraged by this declaration, but he said, with a half laugh, that we should not want to stay till midnight. 1 Indeed, it is all in very short language in the New Testament, where it says we must bear each other's burdens. It says that no man is to live for himself alone, and no man is to die for himself alone. For my part, I do not think I should work a day if I were not pleased with the thought that I was doing my share to clothe a man who cannot clothe himself as well as I can clothe him, — some poor fellow off in Dakota or catching whales in the Arctic Seas, maybe,' he said, laughing. * I want to do my share in the work of this world. It happens that I have been trained to do this as a weaver. I call myself a good weaver, and I think I am able to- teach other people something about weaving. If I did not think so I should go about something else ; I would not come with

Workman to this mill. But I want to do this as a disciple of Jesus Christ and a child of God. I want to do it in such a way that I shall not be ashamed of doing it when I come to die.

" ' Now, Mr. Nourse and Mr. Spinner both,' he said, ' this plan of yours is somewhat new in the way in which you have set it up. It really implies, as far as I can see, all that I have ever contended for when I have made speeches, as I have often done, in our trade-union meetings. If you will let me say so, this plan, as Mr. Spinner has drawn it up, throws our business of manufacturing on very much the same ground on which most business is done in America. Men are used to such a union as I make, and as Workman makes, with Mr. Spinner and anybody he has with him to carry on this mill. Men know perfectly well that there must be a director or manager ; there must be somebody to make plans and somebody to carry out plans ; and we are not such fools as to suppose that that somebody is to work without being paid for it. I am not such a fool as to suppose that he will know how to do his work without learning how. We are not, therefore, jealous at all of the man who directs our industry, who manages the concern, who says what is profitable and what is not profitable, and who buys and sells our goods. If you will think of it, that is exactly what is done in every wholesale store or retail shop. There is a man who buys my groceries, for instance ; he knows where to buy them and how to buy them cheaply, and, although he sells them to me for half as much again as he gave for them, I do not quarrel with him. It is a convenience for me to buy a pound of sugar instead of buying a barrel of sugar, and I do not quarrel with the man who gives me that convenience. But, behind the grocer, there is a bank, which lends him money and provides him with the capital which he is going to use. Now here, Mr. Nourse, I am not sure that you would agree with me, but I am telling you the average opinion of American workmen about the relationship of that bank to that grocer. They say that the bank provides him with capital at certain rates, which do not vary very much from time to time. There was once a time when they were even fixed by law at six per cent, or thereabouts. No one says that was wise, and I suppose it was not wise. Still, this is certain : those rates do not go up and down in exact correspondence with the ups and downs of business. When my grocer has very little custom he does not find that the banks lend him money any more readily because he wants it more. In fact, he does not tell the bank very accurately what the state of his business is ; they do not ask him very carefully. They are careful to know if his credit is good, — that he does not press them too hard, — and if he is safe they lend him money.