THE SUCCESS OF AMERICAN

MANUFACTURERS

SOME time ago I held conversation with a Spanish gentleman who had been making a tour of England. 'Yes,' he said, in reply to an inviting question of mine, 'I have seen many things that have filled me with wonder: the rush of business in London, the magnificence of your buildings, the keenness in trade. I have seen your great steelworks in Sheffield, your busy Black Country about Birmingham, your shipbuilding yards on the Clyde-side, and your great cottonfactories in Lancashire. It is all marvellous. But I wouldn't like to be an Englishman. I am glad to be going back to my own sunny Spain. We're a poor people, but we get some brightness out of life. We've got no great commerce to be proud of; but then we've got no country bleached of all beauty, as I've seen in your Black Country; we've got no crowds of young men and women in consumption from working in mills, as in Yorkshire and Lancashire. You're a great people, a mighty industrial nation. But what a price you are paying for it! I'm going back to my orange trees and sunshine and happiness.'

At the time I thought little of my friend's outburst. Recently I have been recalling it every day. For I have returned from a mission of inquiry into industrial conditions prevailing in the United States. I have been coming in contact with many British manufacturers, and the reply they have invariably given, when I have pictured to them the dash, the sweeping success of industrial America, has been, 'Oh, yes, the Americans are a great people. But we in England don't live to work: we work to live. What is the good of being alive if you have to slave from morning till night as those Yanks do? Look at the price they are paying! They are old men before they are forty. They are all anxious and careworn. They can talk about nothing but money-making. We've no city of suicides, as Allegheny is, outside Pittsburg-where the life is sapped out of the workpeople— and, thank God, we have no hustling commercialism as in Chicago. We can do without the rush the Americans think so necessary. We haven't got so many millionaires, but we've got healthy men. Old England is good enough for us.'

As I have heard something like this from manufacturers in all parts of Great Britain, my recollection has skipped back to what the Spaniard said. The thought has crept into my mind that the Spaniard was a little envious of England's commercial greatness, and yet made himself quite happy by giving a modern turn to the old story of the fox and the grapes. And, honestly, I have not yet convinced myself that the average British manufacturer-in his inclination to suggest that he could do as well as the American if he were disposed, but that he does not simply because he doesn't think it worth while—is not taking up a point of view regarding America the same as the Spaniard took regarding England.

It is a happy but a dangerous point of view, because it is so plausible, because it produces a placid contentment and a serene, superior smile that the Englishman is not such a fool as the American. At the best, however, it is a little bit of ingenious self-deception.

What we British people have first to get rid of in considering industrial America is the Spanish attitude. We have only to look round our own country to admit in our minds, if we hesitate to express it with our lips, that the reason British manufacturers do not commercially go the pace is not because they do not want to, but because they cannot.

As the result of my investigations in the United States two things came out most prominently: first, that the British artisan is superior to the American workman; and, secondly, that the American manufacturer, the employer, the director of labour, is infinitely superior to his British prototype. The chief reason America is bounding ahead as an industrial nation is not excellence of workmanship, but ability in administration, in control, in being adaptable to the necessities of the day.

We in England must go back thirty or sixty years to find the origin of most of the huge manufacturing concerns in Great Britain. They began in small, insignificant ways, and they climbed to eminence in far less than a generation. Their founders were, in the main, superior artisans; long-sighted, industrious men, having little concern for anything outside their own trade; concentrating all their physical and mental energies; tumbling back, year after year, all their earnings into the business, and so rearing firms famed the world over not only for capacity but for the excellence of work. Those men sprang from a robust, unpampered common people. Their grammar might have been shaky, but they knew everything about every department of their works. They had rather a contempt for the tinsel life of society. They gave body and soul to business.

Such men, builders-up of Great Britain's industrial greatness, belong to a past generation. Their works are now under the control of their sons or their grandsons, excellent men, but lacking the grit of the man whose portrait, in oils, hangs in the main office. It is

not in any reason to be expected they should have that grit. They have lacked the essential that spurred the founder of the business to success-necessity. They were born into success. They have spent several years following academic courses at a university; they have developed cultured tastes; their range of interests has been widened; the calls of public life have induced them to give a portion of their time to educational, philanthropic, municipal, or political affairs; the demands of society have not infrequently led them to sporting with time in a way which must make the old gentleman' whose portrait is in the office positively spin in his grave with wrath. They are charming men, the heads of Great Britain's industrial concerns; they play golf and they entertain well. But they would never have been as wealthy as they are if it hadn't been for their fathers or grandfathers. They are touched with the inertia consequent on riches. The reputation of their firms has been so high for a quarter of a century that they think it as solid as the British Constitution. They have had no incentive to slog and slave like the Americans. They belong to the second or the third generation.

All this is, of course, a generalisation, and, like most generalisations, cannot be made to apply to particular cases. But it is, I believe, a generalisation which accurately represents the position of the mass of British manufacturers.

The American manufacturers of the present day are of the first generation. They are the kind of men, with differences, such as we had in England half a century ago creating mighty industrial concerns. Take up a catalogue of big American firms, and you will be surprised at the tiny percentage that did not start from practical nothings, and whose heads did not launch first into business with the proverbial shilling. Once I was talking to a millionaire, and in reply to an airy question of mine what was the first ingredient to make a man as wealthy as himself he replied, 'Poverty!'

Here, then, is one of the foundations of the colossal success attained by so many American firms: that their directors came from rough stock, many of them immigrants or the children of immigrants-men who had the initial courage to break with the old ties in Europe, to forsake their homeland, their friends, and go into a strange world with a healthy determination as their only asset; men, indeed, who have had to shift for themselves, who have not sunk because they have been obliged to put forth all their energies to swim, who have had the whole world to combat, and who, by the necessities of the struggle, have been obliged to put every ounce of brain into their work.

The American has had the best of incentives-Had to'-and his brain has been strained, often to snapping, to gain all points that mean advantage. These men are often loud-mannered and bragging

tongued; they display a lack of refinement which makes a cold shiver run down one's back in talking to them. But probably the fathers and grandfathers of our present-day British manufacturers had like failings. The point, however, to be considered in this matter of comparison is that the Americans have been through the mill: their whole life is absorbed in their business; their conversation hardly ever gets beyond the radius of how more dollars can be made. You can never forget that here are men who give every moment of their life to their work. I do not put it forward as a noble life, but it is the life that makes successful business men.

The American is a polyglot composition. We British folk chaff him on his habit of blowing,' of always making out his firm as twice as successful as it really is, and of declaring his machine will do three times as much as it can actually do. Still, we have a fondness for the American. But the fondness is not returned. Ambassadors, I know, say agreeable things in after-dinner speeches at Fourth of July celebrations. Go, however, among the common people and read the 'Yellow Press '-and if the common people and the Yellow Press don't represent educated America they do represent American feeling and sentiment and antipathy-and there you will find a resentment toward the nations of Europe. There is nothing of this to be seen in the pleasant social circles to which the average visiting Briton is introduced. It exists strongly, undeniably, among the masses, and these are the people, more than in any other country, who count in America. The reason is not far to seek. The majority of Americans are not more than a single generation removed from being Europeans themselves. They left the old countries with no love in their hearts. For a long time they have been the butt of ridicule to polite society in Europe. They have felt as the new rich always feel-that in manners they are not standing on safe ground; they have resented the contemptuous smile of the other countries, and they have convinced themselves that European countries are back-numbers anyhow, and don't cut no ice!'

It has not been the paupers of Europe who have gone to make the American people, but rather men determined, and maybe a little rancorous under a sense of curbed ambition, who have thrown off old ties. The immigrant races are mixed by marriage. So a new race —not a branch of the Anglo-Saxon at all—has sprung into existence with that alertness of brain you invariably find in the offspring of mixed peoples. They start fresh, with no local customs, with no traditions, with nothing but the feeling they are a new nation, somewhat sneered at by the other nations of which they have to get abreast. Not quite confident where they are exactly, the Americans make a bold shot and declare they are first. This, indeed, is the perpetual song of the newspapers. In England we constantly tell one another Great Britain is going to the devil. Americans always tell one

another America is the leading nation on the face of the earth. An English manufacturer receives a big order and is not at all desirous other firms in the same line should know it. When an American manufacturer receives an order it is blared to the world, and he is interviewed. The English manufacturer has ideas about ' reserve' and 'dignity.' The American sticks all his goods in his shop-window for the world to gape at. He is cocksure; he is buoyant; he is absolutely certain of success. So, breezily, with slapdash rush, 'joshing'-not being accurate in his facts-he pushes ahead in a way that startles the Englishman.

Therefore, in considering America at work there are these important factors not to be lost sight of: that the American is always enthusiastic; that he is the son of a virile race, with a quickness, an adroitness of intellect that is the result of mixed breeding; and that the heads of firms are mostly men who sprang from the people, are the makers of their own lives, and know their business through and through.

It is within the reach of every American to be a landed proprietor for himself; at least, to own sufficient ground to provide for himself and his family. It is this bottom fact which accounts for high wages in the United States. Where every man can work for himself, extra pay, compared with what he could get in other countries, must be offered to induce him to work for another man. Therefore wages are much higher than in Great Britain. Wages, however, are only comparable when you take into account their purchasing power. To the rude immigrant, the Irishman, the Swede, the German, the Hungarian, the Italian, the French-Canadian, American wages are phenomenal. To the British working man, however, the wage is only large as a figure. Wages both in England and America are on the upward trend. But while wages in America have, within the last ten years, increased 2 per cent., the cost of living in the Eastern States has increased 10 per cent., and westward, in a place like Chicago, it has gone up 40 per cent. So the real wages of the American worker are considerably lower than they were ten years ago. I know that in many industries the increase of wages has been 10 per cent. ; but in striking an average it has to be borne in mind that in all work not actually physical-that is, in all work that is clerical, administrative, supervisory-the wage has decreased. And here we get just a glimpse of a state of things coming about in America that we are very familiar with in Britain-a fondness of the new generation for the towns rather than for the country, a distaste for labour that means grimy hands and mucky clothes, and a flocking to work which gives a clean collar and passable cuffs, but a wage inferior to that of a mechanic.

Wages vary in different parts of the continent, and the extraordinary fact is that where the wages are largest in cash they are the