« p. 293-302: Chicago: An Impression
The Cat in the Piano Factory
p. 303-318
Writers who visit America frown upon visiting the Chicago slaughterhouses. The excellent H.G. Wells refused to watch as innocent animals were driven into herds and pushed to their deaths. Other minds, of a lesser caliber, have followed Wells’s example. I suspect that the reason for their restraint isn’t so much any sympathy with the animals as it is the extraordinary and definitive description of the “packing houses” laid out in Upton Sinclair’s masterpiece The Jungle. I myself don’t understand why you shouldn’t see the beef and pork cut up at ten o’clock which will be served to you at eleven o’clock for lunch in the form of fillets and pork chops. It seems to me, that what’s more important than the fate of the animals being chopped up is the fate of the people who chop them up. For that reason, I took a look for myself into Armour’s slaughterhouses.
A month later, I met Sinclair in New York and talked to him about his book. The Jungle, a work which you cannot praise highly enough and which you can hold up above the tide of contemporary endeavors, is the work of a socialist. He has uncovered the evils of this system for the world to consider. For him, there was more to explain to the world than the pitiful conditions in which these slaughterhouse workers live. He also explained the economic connections which have ruined these people -- not to mention the meat, which is prepared here for consumption under the most cockeyed hygenic conditions. When I was alone with him, Sinclair talked about the effect of his book on the American public: “I wanted to hit them in the heart, I hitted them in the stomach!” So now, in the dark, moldy, stench-filled corridor, where the poor, pale young ladies pack cuts of meat into metal tins from seven in the morning until seven at night, a hand-washer sits there imposingly for the sake of the visitors who bustle around her. A sign reads that the cuts of meat are packed into tins by fingers which are washed daily, and there the hand-washer sits in the corridor. Her polished nails glow in the shine of the lightbulbs. She sits there bored to death, a showpiece in the middle of the stench, and as the others work feverishly around her, she reads a well-worn novel. Possibly The Jungle.
Otherwise, everything remains just as it was. Around the colossal fortresses of the slaughterhouses, open wooden stalls stretch on for miles, where the cows, sheep, and pigs await their destiny. Now and again, a door opens and animals stream out, driven through canals and sheds that open up before them, a labyrinth of paths and angled streets that lead to a covered gangway onto a Bridge of Sighs, at whose end the bleating, squealing, and mooing throngs gradually descend to their sharp deaths.
Over there is the round wheel of wood, on which the struggling pigs turn as they hang from their hind feet. A thickset fellow stands in front of the wheel with a sharpened spear. The wheel turns the pig’s stomach at just the right height, so that the fellow can do the pig in with his first short cut from up to down. At this point the struggling victim realizes exactly what’s going on. It forces out a fearful squeal like a hurt child, then sprays the fellow with a thin, hot, red jet into his face. Then it is conveyed by a chain over the hands of the murderer and is transferred to the next butcher, who executes an equally short, elegant, and systematic incision. A hundred incisions later the animal has been prepared according to all the rules of the art. It is blanched, de-haired, broken into its parts, brought into the cooler, and any trace of its days on earth has been erased. It has now taken its final form as human nourishment.
And the wheel turns and the thickset fellow makes his first cut. For thirty years he stands there and makes his first cut surely and confidently, the same way a bank director sets his signature on a document. He earns a lot of money, sixty cents an hour, and is as much a representative figure of modern American as Dowie, Rockefeller, and Roosevelt. He has kept up this pace thirty years long -- 25 animals a minute, that makes 1500 an hour, equaling 15,000 for a ten-hour workday. For thirty years he has remained at his post, standing in the rush of America. Millions of pigs have been brought to his spear, right where the people’s carnivore instincts want them. Do I hate this man for his job, for his calm, unconscious, raw naturalness? Do I hate a man who buys the well-being of his family with death throes, thin red streams, and frightened squeals? Not a chance! I admire him for his strength and his speed.
After all, do you think he enjoys being a Not-Person, a Not-Animal, a Not-Thing, some product of Bosch’s hell? He is a standard and measure of human strength, a record-breaker in the sort of efficiency that got him his career in the first place. That is what he is.
He’s an enemy, not of the pigs, but of his coworkers. This is our fellow from Bosch’s hell. It’s his efficiency that makes him his coworkers’ enemy, the same efficiency that keeps up the pace. From the very beginning, it’s a law here that his efficiency is the enemy of anything less efficient. But in this country, a country that has made a religion out of efficiency, a religion whose temple has been raised up next to democracy and has a stronger following, in modern America this law has a small addition, a tiny supplement, which is precisely this: Efficiency is the enemy of efficiency. --
For years, a man named Frederick Taylor worked as an engineer for Bethlehem Steel, which belonged to the Carnegie. On his way from the casters to the office and back, he would stay awhile, standing on top and watching how the coarse lumps of irons, lying around in the open, were loaded onto carts.
A small German, whom he pitifully names Schmidt in his book (“Scientific Management” by F. Taylor, I believe published by Macmillan), steered his way into Taylor’s attention. This small German was a strong lad, who on a daily basis was able to load about 12 1/2 tons of “pig-iron” onto the carts. He did this work for a daily wage of $1.15. Taylor watched the lad and asked his supervisor about the small German’s private life. Schmidt was father to a family and had bought with his wages a small piece of land just outside the city, where, for an hour before he left for work and an hour after he came home in the evening, he built a little house for him and his family to live in.
“This Schmidt is a thief!” Taylor said. “Those two hours of work he does on his house are proof that he has stolen two hours from Bethlehem Steel, a company which has clearly bought his strength for $1.15 a day.”
Taylor got Schmidt to come over and asked him, if he wouldn’t perhaps like to earn $1.85? Schmidt said yes to this strange question, but couldn’t keep from asking Taylor what would be asked of him in return. Taylor called for the supervisor and took the supervisor and Schmidt into the yard to the iron clumps, where he began to show the both of them a number of specific movements and methods.
According to Taylor’s wishes, Schmidt imitated these movements and worked at the same pace as Taylor: One -- two -- three, then sat down to rest when Taylor ordered, “Now rest,” . . . Schmidt started earning $1.85 a day and was now loading forty-seven and a half tons per day (as opposed to the twelve and a half which he’d performed up to that time) . . . For his multiplied efforts, Schmidt earned one and a half times as much as before. Naturally, he couldn’t continue building his little house, because he was too tired in the evening and too groggy in the morning. However, Taylor’s system was born, the system of “scientific exploitation of human strength in the service of industry”, the system of “speeding up”, or, as I like to call it, the boosting of the straining and consumption of human energy to the furthest boundaries of natural ability.
Others have used this system in different industries, such as Gilbreth with the bricklayers. The American bricklayers don’t lift bricks with both hands anymore, but instead with the right hand, while with the left they put the spatula in the mortar. This way, a brick house will be built at a pace of 350 bricks per hour, instead of the previous pace of 120 bricks per hour.
A new type of overseer (or maybe they’ve been prefigured by Pharoah and the Emperor Carcella) has entered the American workforce. Before the birth of Taylor’s system, the overseer had the duty to make sure the work was done correctly and on time. But the new overseer, the Speed Boss, sets the pace and the number of units which need to be delivered. He is the man who gets on in life by making sure his people are constantly breaking records without cease.
What are the consequences of this murderous pace for the worker and the industry? First of all, efficiency eliminates inefficiency. That goes without saying. But then efficiency eliminates itself. And then, of course, this way of doing things greatly increases the amount of product that the factory needs to lock up, and the factory is going to need to lock it up for a longer time because they don’t know what to do with their piled up, stacked up product. America produces three times as much as it consumes, and the exports can’t keep up with this overproduction. (Keep in mind that Schmidt of Bethlehem Steel is an immediate cause of the Chinese Revolution. If the steel industry had controlled its lust for exporting into the Middle Kingdom, Mr. Sun Jat Sen would have never climbed onto Wall Street and into world history!)
The worker takes time off part of the year, living on his meager savings, if he has any, and finds that his own efficiency has been turned against him.
But this system, this low-down bastard of a system blooms into new variations, conquers factories far and wide across America, one factory after the other, soon stretching its arm over us, coming after our people, our food, our homeland, everywhere . . .
A further consequence of this exploitation is -- at least for the time being -- the uniquely American institution of the Age Line, the age limit.
For a worker over forty, it is very difficult in America to find a position at a factory or business. But it’s also very difficult to keep a job once you turn forty. On Monday morning at six o’clock, five hundred young men stand in front of the factory door, on which hangs the plaque:
“We don’t employ people over forty!”
The boss has the choice of the strongest and the youngest. --
In New York I was shown workers who dyed their hair. These workers, before they go to their jobs, grease their temples with shoe polish, as part of their daily routine, in order to bring the red out in their skin. Others pay ten dollars a month for “drugs”, as they say, for arsenic mixtures to artificially stimulate the activities of the heart during working hours.
In Chicago, I read a newspaper article with the headline: “What can a forty-year-old worker do who has just lost his job?” Answer: He can, for example, become an usher for a movie theater.
(How the organized trade unions, who have gathered together the best and most efficient workers, put up with this tyranny, I don’t know. I only know that the large companies don’t like hiring organized workers. But in the entire country the “unions” stand in a not unjustified disrepute. More on this later.)
Today I tore up the remains of my references, which I’ve kept in my suitcase the entire trip and which have taken me to all sorts of great business people, factory owners, and Chicago millionaires. At least sixteen times, I have carried on in the same conversation with business people, factory owners, and millionaires. After five minutes, the person sitting across from me begins to grumble about the “labor unions”, after ten we discuss charitable organizations, and when the person across from me stands up to run to the window and show me the skyscrapers on the other side of the street, attempting to prove to me the wonderful growth of his homeland, then I know that the time is coming to take my overcoat from the hanger. What comes next are four new letters of introduction to business people, factory owners, and millionaires, all of which disguise this pious wish: To hell with you, European. --
What happens to the old, the cast-off, the dismissed, who after forty years still haven’t collected enough for a nest egg?
With luck the American worker dies young. -- With luck. -- Unfortunately America leads in the percentage of suicides, the mentally ill, and crimes of desperation. Madhouses and prisons spring up everywhere and can barely hold their contents. -- In industrial cities I have been begged for money after sunset in a way I’ve only seen in Rome and Naples. -- Anyone who wants to see a picture of the most hopeless and degraded of human creatures might like to go to the shelters in Kansas City, to South Clark Street in Chicago, to the much-praised Mills Hotel on New York’s East Side. He might like to see for one hour a night the “bread-line” in front of the doors of one of the large foodhouses, the Salvation Army, where two to three thousand sturdy men wait silently and patiently. He might like to see the hungry, the unemployed, the beggars in the night . . .
He might also want to inquire about the “left-behind”, the vagabonds who have set off for the enticing Wild West, their last paycheck in their pockets, never to be seen again.
One of the most difficult problems in America is that of the Landstreicher, the tramp. The wandering Jewish population makes up a frighteningly high percentage of these “jacks-of-all-trades”. The poor Jewish workers, who have already reached the ends of their ropes, beaten before the battle, grown anemic from the pogroms at home, immigrate to the land of freedom and just can’t keep up with the speed.
The man has a choice between suicide, exhaustion, insanity, and crime. He chooses the life of a tramp. Usually in-between 37 and 40, he leaves his wife and children sans adieu, becoming a “bum” and disappearing into the West or the South.
Americans are kind-hearted. They don’t like seeing someone starve to death. The poor don’t hurt the poor. Only the rich hurt the poor. Carnegie himself, the great philanthropist and peacemaker, proves on closer inspection to be the most malicious and most merciless slave driver. In his Pittsburgh Steel Company there is still a 24-hour-shift, the notorious “double lunch”. The intellectuals of America have tried a revolt, running their heads up against the walls of Pittsburgh and winding up with bumps on their heads. If only there wasn’t this business of trading energy and strength for money and food, the poor and rich could return, so they say, to their mutual Inner Being.
What sorts of risks are run by the poor Jewish bum, or the bums of other religions? Even worse than if he were in his tenement, he can’t really go out in the open with the people of the wide wilderness. Even if he’s managed to smash through to the Pacific, he has still only become a Great Beggar or something similar. And if he hasn’t, he sees death always as a comfort, where a mild supervisor beckons in the distance.
You might want to ask the charitable societies about the ones he’s left behind. What about his wife and children? With their need and the way they’ve been abandoned, some society or another will certainly be compelled to help them, almost as if the bum himself had bequeathed it to them. Does the man even think about his wife and children?
Without singling out any of the factories I’ve seen, I have to say that I wasn’t prepared for so many unhygienic, deadly, and criminally neglected “businesses”.
In these places, the transmission belts rush around without any guard rails, boiling mixtures spray about in the open, fuming substances are rubbed on shoe leather without anyone using masks, a thousand violations stand out here and there, and a part of you revolts against all of it. The fact that I came out of these places with my skin intact is solely due to my guardian angel, who has accompanied me faithfully on this entire trip, and I offer him my deep felt thanks.
This democratic country never seems to have heard of accident insurance, old-age pensions, health insurance, or other similarly civilized things. Next to the fairly intact beggars, the mutilated of all categories are embarrassingly conspicuous. Rabelais couldn’t dream up people any more grotesque than these creatures who meet their shameful fates in the bustle of American factories. You can see them in the streets, in bars, and at the controls of elevators.
But it’s not just the bodily mutilation which draws your full sympathy. It is far more aggravating to see what the modern methods of production have done to these working people’s souls. --
The wheel that takes the bright-eyed pigs to the thickset fellows in the Armour Works is set into motion at the instructions of the Speed Boss, and if today it’s turned at a speed of 25 animals a minute, he turns up the speed tomorrow to 30 animals a minute.
If the miserable wretches upstairs in the packing hall wrap 15,000 tin boxes in paper -- their hands move at such a pace you can barely see their fingers -- then all it takes is a nasty look from the supervisor and tomorrow, by closing time, they will have wrapped 16,000 boxes, and then 17,000, and so on.
Downstairs, on the slaughterhouse floor, the butchers stand in a row. The steaming bodies are brought before them, hanging from chains, still bleeding or having already gone through the soap bath. Each butcher has his own specific motion to carry out. One cuts the upper part of the tail with a short, sharp knife. The next detaches the tail from the spine with a slice. The next tears the intestines out of the animal’s stomach. The next throws them on a cart, which is moved mechanically away from him. The next takes the liver out of the cart of entrails, and so on.
Each one of these men, from seven in the morning until seven at night, has the same small but important task to perform. He must take care to be good at it, because the chain doesn’t know how to stop. Tell me how he can do it, wiping the sweat from his forehead, wiping the blood spraying from the cadaver. He chews tobacco. That is his only break, his release. Why should it matter to him where he spits his tobacco juice or where he blows his nose?
In front of him the animal rides past on an endless chain. Behind him sits the supervisor. All it takes is a single animal passing him by untouched, and the butcher is finished, thoroughly finished.
Work it out for yourself. How long does it take before a person, a creature with so many wonderful mechanisms of the heart, the nervous system, and the astonishing musculature of the heart, with the joints, hands, and fingers, how long does it take for this person performing the exact same movements over and over, before each mechanism, each mystery dies out, so that it can he barely make it through the dark night into the despairing morning.?
3700 people sit in the lovely, shiny rooms of the famous clock factory in Elgin, each of whom has a minuscule task to see to. 2500 clocks are put together there each day. That makes 211 clocks per hour. So imagine what greets you when, thirsty for knowledge, you march by the workers’ tables. Had Dante had such encounters in the pools of the damned? And yet most of them are happy with their jobs. In front of them, the machine they have to serve hisses and thunders and beats. Hair-thin needles drill hair-thin holes into small copper plates. One millimeter too far, and the needle goes right into their flesh and their fingernails, and in that moment all their money disappears.
In many of these factories, warehouses, and so on, many brochures about baseball, tennis, and football teams were handed to me. They discussed what these factory teams did during the free hours after work.
I’ve also seen the “Whisky-Line” on the borders of the slaughterhouses and the city, where the worker pours himself an “eye-opener” in the morning before going to work. It keeps his stomach quiet and holds him over until the midday break. In the evening, though, he drains his happy hour drink to wash down the disgust and desperation of the day’s work, the ten hours that have poisoned his soul.
I am interested in experiencing what the worker does with his free time. What effect does all this drudgery have on him in his off-hours? During these hours, the worries of these workers’ souls are, it seems to me, a far more important problem than any baseball team.
The meticulousness of the industrial work brings the worker ever closer to the level of the lifeless machine, a precise and automatically functioning collection of parts.
The monotonous rhythm of the same gestures and the same noises deadens the intelligence, the instinct for independent action and the impulse towards differentiation, awareness, and synthesis. The functions of the cerebellum cease, and the fullest creation of nature sinks further to the level of animals.
In the technical schools of Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan sit people who want to give the machine the last degree of perfection, so that they can push their fellow human beings further down into deepest slavery.
Just this day the dean of the engineering faculty at the University of Cincinatti, Dr. Hermann Schneider, held a lecture for the clubs of business people in Chicago. He talked chiefly about the preservation of that valuable characteristic, the quintessence of industry: the need for stimulation. It should be said, that he dealt less with the soul of the worker than with the soul of speed.
Some women friends from New York have told me about some experiments of this nature, such as the reading of a popular novel in a cigarette factory or some innocent singing among seamstresses. But the experiment which Dr. Schneider reported is so picturesque I have named the entire chapter after it. --
In a piano factory in Ohio, the young ladies employed to make some of the more trivial parts just couldn’t take it anymore. The poor things were pale, tired, and apathetic. Finally, they would just stay away in order to not go crazy from the monotony of it all.
The boss of that particular unit thought of everything he could, trying out pretty decorations in the workrooms and comfortable armchairs, but nothing helped. The young ladies abandoned their posts, held up their unit, and hampered the surrounding units and the entire factory. Finally, the boss came up with the winning idea. He bought himself a nice, large, maltese cat and brought it to the ladies one morning. The cat was immediately the mascot of the department. Every lady brought her something. One would bring a treat, another a little ribbon, yet another a bell.
The cat’s basket was the central point for all the motherly instincts of these ladies, who had never played with a doll and who weren’t allowed to care for children, but who instead were forced to work, to work without restraint and without hope, endlessly . . .
“The employment of the inborn sympathy of women for the cat has raised work performance in this department by about ten percent,” said Dean Schneider. “The overseer’s good idea was used in other departments under his supervision. When using this and other similar stimulants, everything worked out for the best.”
Chicago has made me sick. In this city, I have stared the bloody disgrace of modern civilization in the face. I have seen it and become acquainted with it. Should I leave? Where would I go? Would I escape from hell? How could I? The modern world is hell.