Our Common Country

Front matter

Our Common Country

By

With foreword by the editor Frederick E. Schortemeier Author of Rededicating America

Reconsecration to God

I do not believe there is any other influence so much needed in a tumultuous world as a reconsecration to God Almighty. I rejoice that America is free in religion. We boast our civil liberty and our political independence, but when we contemplate world conditions to-day the best thing in this Republic is religious freedom.

Sometimes I think the world has gone adrift from its moorings religiously, and I know it will help if we have a revival of religious faith. I want a government that is just, and I don't think a government can be just if it does not have somehow a contact with Omnipotent God.

I know how some of you of the church have been quite carried away by the proposal of a new world relationship. You never stopped to think that in the conception of Versailles there was no recognition of God Almighty. Just as we of America have builded by recognizing Him, the best relationship of the world must be builded upon recognition of the same God.

I have every faith that our nation will take its fitting place in an association of nations for world peace, and I believe that we are going to be able to do it without the surrender of anything we hold dear as a heritage of the American people.

I don't like to talk about religion, just for the sake of conversation, but I do believe that we need more of it in our American life, more of it in government,—the real spirit of it. I think there should be more of the "Do unto others as you would be done by" spirit of service.

It might interest you to know that, while I have always been a great reader of the Bible, I have never read it so closely as in the last weeks, when my mind has been bent upon the work I must shortly take up. I have obtained a good deal of inspiration from the Psalms of David and from many passages of the four gospels, and there's still wisdom in the sayings of old Solomon.

I don't intend to come as the finest exemplar of what we ought to be, but I rejoice in the inheritance of a religious belief and I don't mind saying that I gladly go to God Almighty for guidance and strength in the responsibilities that are coming to me.

Business and Government

We are the great business nation of the world. We shall be able to save that business and prosper it by a fair measure of common sense, and we ought and must do it. We will preserve a willingness to listen to the will of the people, and will construe the desire for a common good fortune to mean the necessary good fortune of business, which is the life-blood of material existence.

American business is not big business. Wilful folly has been in those persons in distended power over our national affairs who have spoken of American business as if it were a large and selfish interest seek- ing special privileges, and who, on that basis, have put their bungling hands upon its throat and tried tinkering and experimenting with it, and abusing it and treating it with suspicion. Let us put an end to holding success to be a crime.

It will be the American people who will do this because American business is everybody's business. Nearly nine-tenths of those who depend for their living and the legitimate fruits of their labors in American manufacturing are the wage-earners. The blow directed at American business, the pulling and hauling of American business by weird economic and social theories, is less menacing, for instance, to the one-tenth who in manufacturing are business executives than it is to the nine-tenths who are our American laborers.

The big business of America is the little business of America. The last available census figures show that more than sixty per cent. of our factories were little plants, none of which turned out more than $100,000 of products. Only twenty-five per cent. of our plants were even doing business as corporations. The average number of workers employed was twenty-five. When we come to analyze what we mean by American business we find out that we mean the daily work of the nation, most of it undertaken in the factory and on the farm in small units. We find out that we even mean the business of the home and of the housewife, and that American business is everybody's business. It is more than that. It is the work of every worker, clothes for his back, food for his mouth.

We must face the new task. We have had a fever of high prices and excessive production out of the sacrificed billions of treasure and millions of lives, but the reconstruction must be sober business, founded on unchanging principle. We must summon the best abilities of America to put America back on the main road, and to remove the debris of the last eight years, and to keep our industries running, and to restore the proper ratio of prosperity to our American agriculture so that it can again bid for good American standard labor.

If our memory is directed again to 1914, we will recall that world war alone saved us from a disaster in peace. We were sharpening our wits in competition with the world, as the President then expressed it, but we dulled our capacity to buy, then war saved us psychologically and commercially; but to-day we are at peace, actual though not proclaimed, and our problems are the problems of peace.

We must always exact, from ourselves and our business, high, honorable and fair dealing by law, and by law's rigid enforcement when necessary, but we must repeal and wipe out a mass of executive orders and laws which, failing to serve effectively that purpose, serve only to leave American business in anxiety, uncertainty and darkness.

We must readjust our tariff, and this time with especial regard for the new economic menace to our American agriculture as well as manufacturing.

We must readjust our internal taxation, especially the excess profits tax, to remove the burdens it imposes upon the will to create and produce, whether that will is the will of the big corporation, of the small corporation, or of the individual.

We must uproot from our national government the yearning to undertake enterprises and experiments which were never intended as the work of our government, which have proved ineffective to a point which sickens us all, and which our government is incapable of performing without wreckage or chaos. Of necessity the machinery of government expands as we grow in numbers as a people, but before government expands in bureaucratic control of business its sponsors ought first to demonstrate a capacity to conduct the business of the government. When government itself has a budget of more than three billions a year, in times of peace, it has a business of its own to look after—and it needs looking after—without seeking new fields to conquer until it has proved capacity for the tasks it must perform.

We must, instead of such experiments, establish a closer understanding between American government and American business, so that one may serve the other, and the other obey and seek cooperation.

We must give government cooperation to business, we must protect American business at home, and we must aid and protect it abroad by the upbuilding of our merchant marine, and a restoration of our self-respecting measure of American protection to her citizens wherever they may go upon righteous errands.

We must build our economic life into new strength and we must do it so that our prosperity shall not be the prosperity of profiteers nor of special privilege.

We must do it so that abroad we are known not as a nation strutting under a plumage of fine words, but as one that knits friendly and peaceful relations by the shuttle of honorable deeds.

We must do it so that at home our economic life yields opportunity to every man not to have that which he has not earned, whether he be the capitalist or the humblest laborer, but to have a share in prosperity based upon his own merit, capacity and worth—under the eternal spirit of "America First."

American business has suffered from staggering blows because of too much ineffective meddling by government, and it is equally true that good government has almost been allowed to die on our hands, because it has not utilized the first sound principles of American business.

The government of the United States, of this nation of ours, which should be an example of American good sense and sound organization, has been allowed to degenerate into an inadequate piece of administrative machinery. While we have heard preaching to all the nations of the earth, which, to put it mildly, has been adequate indeed, the back of our leadership has been turned on the bad example we have set before the world in the conduct of our own affairs. I refer only to the deplorable impairment which has been given our time-tested democratic institutions by robbing our representative government of its place in our republic in order to fatten administrative authority and replace the will of the people by the will of the wilful.

The government has engaged in prodigal waste. The American people pay. It has kept its overstuffed bureaus and departments, many of which are doing overlapping work, in a prime condition of reckless inefficiency. The American people pay. It has engaged in all kinds of costly bungling experiments of government management and ownership of enterprises which other management could do better. The American people pay. It has allowed worthy federal employees, particularly those who are skilled, such as chemists and agricultural experts, to go so badly paid by the government that they have left the service. The American people have to bear the cost. It has poured forth our national treasure into the yawning emptiness of unpreparedness for war and unpreparedness for peace. It has spent our money and failed to do business, while the prodigal flow went on. The American people have paid, and are paying. With a return to sanity we now have another task before us in making the administrative part of our government one in which a people, proud of its abilities in business, can take pride.

We must not let our administrative government crack under the load of its new burdens or those that our future may place upon it. It has been cracking badly. To repair it is the business of every American—not only because of pride, but also because he pays for it, and is entitled to good government without waste.

We have declared for a system of planning our expenditures so that overlapping and leakage and inefficiency shall be revealed before they occur. This national budget plan we must put into force.

We must put our postal service upon a new basis, and extend the merit system in the choice and promotion of federal employees.

We must not only lop off useless jobs, but we must so reward efficiency and value among our public service employees that we may continue to have their loyalty because we have given decent pay and the expectation of promotion when promotion is earned.

We must conduct a careful scrutiny of our great executive departments to plan so that similar labors shall not be duplicated and so that similar functions shall be grouped and not scattered.

We must go to men who know for advice in administrative improvement; we must have to aid us more men trained in agriculture, more technical men, more men who know business and the practises of commerce and trade.

I look upon the responsibility of an executive as being based first of all upon his ability, together with that of capable men called to execute. An executive officer of any other than government business would be discharged if he allowed paralysis and perversion of the functioning of that business, while he and his followers were engaged in addressing advice to the neighbors.

Let them who say that the American people are not awake to these matters take new counsel. The government is the people's business, and they will not see it broken down. The government is the concern of every American—of every man, woman and child. We are shareholders in it and we are looking forward with relief to an end of mismanagement.

This great federal machine has grown up in a century of haphazard expansion, until, as recently described, it resembles "an antiquated central building with a large number of surrounding sheds and cottages, overcrowded with overlapping officials and saturated with methods of organization and administration fully fifty years behind the times."

An eminent senator once said he could substitute his private business methods for government practises and save hundreds of millions. It was thought to be true when he said it, and we might treble the figures for the saving now.

Here in America we have developed the most proficient and most efficient types of business organization and administration in the world; they have shown the greatest capacity for administrative vision. We mean to call that administrative quality and fitness into the service of the government, and establish an advance in government business, not merely talk about government progress.

Conditions are calling, capabilities await, the needs are urging and we pledge a new order—a business government, with business efficiency, and a business concern for public approval.

The Inspiration of Labor

Life is labor, or labor is life, whichever is preferred. Men speak of the labor issue as paramount or imperious or critical—it is always the big thing because it is the process of all progress and attainment, and has been since the world began. The advocate of excessively-reduced periods of labor simply proposes to slow down human attainment, because labor is the agency of all attainment. If by some miracle of agreement we could reduce the hours of labor to four per day—I speak of labor now in the sense of that which is employed for pay—the live, progressive, civilization-creating, progressive labor would have to go on working twice or thrice that time, because labor is the ferment of human development. No one will challenge these general truths, but we do have a conflict of opinion as to how labor shall be employed and the measure of its compensation.

I wish it distinctly noted that I shall say nothing to one group of fellow citizens which I could not as cordially utter to another. It was my good fortune to have a call from a committee representing several American farm organizations, and I told them frankly I preferred to greet them as fellow-Americans rather than farmers, because our big thought must be of American consumers, they among them. They were concerned in producing food, which is of first concern to all America. I am thinking of industrial America, that industrial America in which every one of our hundred millions is deeply concerned, and the good fortune of whose workers is of highest interest to our people as a whole.

Do not let any one ever tell you that any political party is insensible to the cause of labor. Parties are the agencies of government, and men who assume public responsibility are deeply anxious about the common weal. Demagogues or agitators, most of whom are agitating for the profit therein, "Reds" or reactionaries, all of them deny the high intent and genuine concern of parties and government for the highest good fortunes of all the people. Frankly, I do not think any party is indifferent or unmindful. The only difference is in the program for the greatest good. I want you to understand me definitely. So far as I can be helpful it shall be along the line of promoting the good fortunes of all the American people, because in common good fortune, made secure, we have the field in which to work to adjust the distribution of rewards to the highest conception of fairness and justice.

Let me repeat a public utterance of mine. Noting the advanced ground reached through the sufferings and sacrifices of the World War, I said we contemplated a new level, a new order, and would never return to the old pre-war conditions. No such return has ever been recorded in all history. I spoke of high wages, and said I wished the existing high scale to remain, on one explicit condition—that for the high wage, the American workman shall give to his task the highest degree of efficiency. There isn't any other solution. There isn't any other way to keep wages high and lower the cost of living to any appreciable degree.

The menace of the present day is inefficient production. I am not advocating the driving, slavish period of toil, which saps men's energies and oppresses the spirit, but I do advocate honest, efficient return for proper pay. I hold that the slacker, the loafer on the job, is not only the greatest obstacle to labor's advancement, but he is cheating his fellows more than he does his employer. The workman who deliberately adds to costs robs a fellow workman who must buy, and impedes the way to that ideal condition where wage exceeds the cost of living, and there is a balance for the bank account, for home acquirement and indulgence in amusement, diversion and the becoming luxuries which contribute to the ideal life.

Let no one beguile you with dreams of idleness, of the passing of employment or the abolition of employer and employee. Life without toil, if possible, would be an intolerable existence. Work is the supreme engagement, the sublime luxury of life. And there will be employers so long as there is leadership among men, and there will be employees until human progress is paralyzed and the development of human kind dies on one common altar of mediocrity. Our problem then is to find the high order of employment, the ideal relationship, the conditions under which we may work to the highest attainment and the greatest common good for all concerned.

It is utterly false to assume that labor and capital are in deadly conflict. Such a preachment comes from those who would destroy our social system. More, these two elements do not constitute alone the fabric of our industrial life, and neither of them, alone, ever added to the treasure of mankind. The element of management is as essential to present-day industrial success, amid modern complexities, as breath to the human body. And indissolubly linked with these three is the consuming public.

It is not important to establish which element comes first, since each is essential to the other. We do know that labor, the human element, is of deepest public concern. Hence it is that American public opinion, which is invariably the ruling force in popular government, when deliberately crystallized, wishes the labor forces to be satisfied. Not contented, because contentment is the awaiting avenue to paralysis, but so satisfied that there is a soul of interest in all our employments.

The deplorable side of modern industry, with gigantic factory and the productive machinery, is that too many men are toiling like machines at work. There ought to be more in a day's work than the mere grind and the pay therefor, even though the pay is generous. Men ought to know a pride in the thing done. There ought to be inspiration to skill and glory in accomplishment. One ought to have before him the goal of being best in his line. The mere fulfillment of the requirements to hold a job never made superin- tendent or led to a captaincy in all the world of employment. Contentment with a job, with eyes riveted on pay day, without enthusiasm to accomplish or desire to excel, never made an advance for any man anywhere.

The big inspiration in life is to get on. We can not get on all alike or be regarded precisely alike. God Almighty never intended it to be so, else He had made us all alike. But we may get on according to our talent, our capacity, and our industry, and out of the advancement of those who lead, must come higher standards for all.

I have no patience with those who commend the levels of mediocrity. That would halt the whole human procession. I can read the aspirations in many a breast. Search the hearts of the parenthood. Fathers and mothers are thinking of their children, and they want them to get on. They often deny themselves to educate their children and ultimately find compensation in that denial. They educate so that sons and daughters may do better than they—it is the natural desire of aspiring life. This is why the world advances. This is the soul of advancing civilization. When men tell you this is the privilege of the few, they challenge your intelligence. It is the opportunity of all. Not all avail themselves, but the opportunity beckons.

I have seen my home city grow from the village of four thousand to the city of thirty thousand. I know the men who are the captains of industry and the commanders of trade and the leaders of finance. I have associated with the head of one great concern when he was toiling for seventy-five cents a day as a youth in the shops. I have seen another at the bench, and still another trying to make the pay envelope meet his obligations. I knew one bank leader as the boy who swept out and did the chores, another as a dollarless farmer boy, another as a struggling youth no more favored than the poorest boy. What's the explanation? Industry, thrift, love of work, interest in tasks, ambition to get on.

I wish I could plant the gospel of loyalty to work and interest in accomplishment. It is the ambition to succeed, the determination to do the most and best—these speed men on to the heights. The pity is that we do not have enough of it under modern conditions. There is too much mechanical grind, too little contact between employer and employee, too little understanding of their mutuality of interest and their joint triumph in success. I hail with equal satisfaction the workman who has pride in the factory and its output, and the employer who has pride and sympathetic interest in his workmen. I want to stress the need of pride. There is little enough to inspire under our modern system, and I want to magnify all there is. And above all else I want American workmen to feel that American products are the best in the world. There is only a touch of satisfaction to say our output is biggest, but it sets the heart aglow to proclaim America's output is the best.

I am sorry the old, intimate contact between employer and employee is gone. When there was intimate touch there was little or rare misunderstanding. I wish we could have the intimacy restored, not in the old way, but through a joint committee of employers and employees, not to run the business, but to promote and maintain the mutuality of interest and the fullest understanding. Herein lies the surest remedy for the most of our ills. Nay, more, I will put it more strongly, I have spoken the preventive, the understanding which prevents disputes, or settles them on the spot.

I never had any trouble with our labor forces in the printing line, though our "boys and girls" have been organized for seventeen years. We know each other pretty well. And yet, with all our intimacy and our freedom from disputes, I may not understand them as I ought nor do they understand all they ought. Let me give an example, because it will illustrate the need of understanding. The basic material, the one thing we must have in the newspaper business is print paper. There has been a shortage of production and the market has been wild. We contracted for our annual supply, but we could not add the amount necessary to meet our normal growth. To meet the volume of business and keep all our men employed we had to buy extra print paper as best we could, and the excess above the contract cost was sufficient to pay out three hundred dollars additional wage to every workman in the shop. But we were obliged to meet so excessive an outlay, and could not pass it on to readers, yet no workman had to bear any share of the strain. Never forget that there are two sides, and I want each to understand the other. I want employers to know what is in the hearts of the workmen—their aspirations, their trials, their problems—all the things essential to concord and good spirit.

To be specific, the need of to-day is the extension by employers of the principle that each job in the big plant is a little business of its own. The reason men in modern, specialized industry go crazy from lack of self-expression is that they are allowed to be mere mechanical motion-makers. They ought to be taught by employers the significance of this job—its unit costs, its relations to other operations, the ways to its greater efficiency. In a word the employer owes it to his men to make them feel that each job stops being an enemy of the man and becomes his associate and friend, and the success achieved opens the way for his looked-for advancement.

The world is thinking about means to prevent war among nations, and we approve, and share the aspiration. But America is also thinking about preventing industrial conflict and all attending waste, suffering and anxiety. The matter has become of interest to the public, even more than the forces engaged in any conflict.

Our observation is, as an eminent labor leader has said, that "all strikes sooner or later are settled around a table; then why not get around a table before the strike begins?"

We can not have compulsory arbitration, because all parties must consent to establish arbitration and enforce its conclusions. I think we can have and ought to have, voluntary volitional arbitration. The best thought of the day commends this way to settlement.

In the broad sense labor's business is selling its skilled or unskilled endeavor, and the basic cost is the cost of living. What labor receives over and above cost of living is pay for its preparation, and a profit for its inspiration.

The insistent thought is to add to this profit, to widen the difference between mere cost and the wage received. All the influence and the organization in the world will not equalize a living cost among a hundred millions. Rentals, until home-owning becomes more wide-spread—as I hope it will become wide-spread—vary according to localities and conditions. The wage scale which contemplates a rental cost in one place might be wholly inadequate to meet the cost in another and a nationalized scale would work an injustice. This point was developed in the recent railway controversies, and proved some very real grievances which the people had not dreamed.

This brings me to the subject of railway legislation, and the enactment of the Cummins-Esch Bill restoring the railways to the lawful owners. We owed it to the railway owners to restore their property, seized for war service, just as we owe the return of the people's money invested in government loans. In free and thoughtful America we do not take advantage of war's tumult to change the regular order of things. I am well aware that many earnest railway workers and advocates of the Socialist plan preferred to take the railroads and put them under the operation of the employees, but that was not keeping faith with America or American promises. We were honor bound to make the return. I favored it for the additional reason that I do not believe in government ownership.

The government must do many things, but it has enough to do without invading the field of private activity, not, at any rate, until government demonstrates its capacity for efficiency.

I do not pretend to say the railway act is perfect; indeed, I know it is not. But Congress was dealing with a problem of first importance, and it had to speed the legislation. There was the conflict of many minds as it was right there should be, and the final act was a compromise. Nevertheless, I believe it to be a good law and cordially supported it. Many railway labor leaders have cried out against it, but I can only wonder why, except for the fundamental objection to the release of government operation.

Let us try out the act and the railway restoration in patience. If we have fallen short, the conscience of America will sanction every modification needed to aim at perfection. America wants her railway workmen justly treated, and will tol- erate nothing less, and America wants her honest investments properly protected, with justice to every agency employed in this great machine of railway transportation.

I have said it before, and I repeat it now, I want the American railway workers to know the best possible working conditions and to be the best paid in the world. Our food, our activities, our exchanges, so much depend on the great railway operations, and above all else, all who travel trust their lives to railway skill and fidelity. Ours ought to be, and must be, the best in the world.

I believe in the protective policy which prospers America first, and exalts American standards of wage and American standards of living high above the Old World. We had little thought of these things during the war, because America was exporting instead of importing—shipping out instead of shipping in—but it will soon be a different situation in the world exchange. I do not object to humanity seeking equalized standards of employment and living, but I do insist on Old World standards being raised to ours, not ours lowered to the Old World.