CHAPTER VIII

MASS PRODUCTION AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION

MASS PRODUCTION AND INTELLECTUAL PRODUCTION

Education in America, where there are about seven hundred thousand students in institutions of collegiate rank alone, has become almost a major industry. Although teachers are not yet organized into trade unions there is a greater cohesion among them as a body than there is among artists, journalists, clergymen, authors, and other men leading what may loosely be called the artistic or intellectual life. Moreover it is easier to get at the economic situation of the professor’s household than it is to do so in the case of the others. Statistics of income are readily available and, thanks to two recent studies, one made of the faculty of Yale and the other of that of the University of California, we have very definite information as to their detailed expenses. For these various reasons the question of the professional income of the intellectual worker and its relation to the general wage or income scale of the country and the standard of living has largely been confined to the teacher. For the same reasons the teacher offers perhaps the best starting point for a present discussion of our problem.

The California study[1] was a survey of the incomes, expenses, and ways of life of ninety-six married members of the faculty, and I shall attempt to summarize only a few of the salient points brought out by the investigation. Half of these families had one child or none and the entire ninety-six averaged one and a half children per family. As a rule the salaries did not cover the necessary living expenses, the median salary of the whole group amounting to only sixty-five per cent of its total income (mostly spent), the difference being made up almost wholly from extra earnings and not from investments. The salaries ranged from $1,400 to $8,000, the average being $3,000; the bulk of the men holding full professorial rank being paid from $4,000 to $5,000. In forty per cent of the families the wives worked and added to the family income. As a rule, the men found teaching in the summer the only way of making the additional amount called for by their expenses, so that one-third of the faculty members and their wives reported no vacation at all; forty per cent had less than two weeks; and sixty per cent less than four weeks.

Correlating salaries and length of service, we find that after four years at college and three to five years additional preparation working for a higher degree or as a teaching fellow, a man may serve on the faculty from twelve to twenty-five years and be close to fifty years of age before he is at all assured of getting from $3,000 to $4,000, even if he is retained and successful. After fifteen years’ service on top of from seven to nine years’ preparation, he has one chance in ten of earning from $5,000 to $7,000. Fourteen years’ service, or twenty-one to twenty-three in all, are required to bring him to security of tenure on a salary of from $4,000 to $5,000. No family spending less than $6,000 was able to afford a full-time maid. Nearly one-third of the wives, mostly college-bred themselves, did all of the family laundry as well as the rest of the housework. For two-thirds of the husbands and one-half of the wives, clothing was reported as costing annually between $100 and $200 each. The average amount spent per family for recreation, other than an automobile, was $200 a year. As a result of the study the investigator reaches the conclusion that $7,000 is the minimum amount per year on which a professional family can live without impairing their own efficiency in their professional work.

The findings at Yale are equally striking. The official report[2] made on conditions there recites, with regard to the members of the faculty spending $4,000 a year, that “the married men at this level are usually of assistant professor rank, often with families of young children. They must live with extreme economy in the cheapest obtainable apartment, borrowing to meet the expenses of childbirth or sickness. The wife does all the cooking, housework, and laundry.” Of those spending $8,500 the report states that “the families of associate professors and the younger full professors at this level, with three children and school expenses from nothing up to $1,000 a year, may either have a full-time servant or spend only $200 to $400 for occasional service. They live on the edge of a deficit. Even a small insurance premium is paid with difficulty and the purchase of clothing is kept as low as possible.” More than a quarter of the faculty families covered by the report had no children, and the average number of children in such families as had any was exactly two. An instructor for the first two years gets a salary of $1,500-$1,800, in his third year $2,100, and thereafter $2,500. An assistant professor gets $3,000 during his first three years, $3,500 in the next three years, and $4,000 during his next three. An associate professor gets from $4,000 to $5,000 and a professor from $5,000 to $8,000. A first-class cook in New Haven costs about $1,000 a year. Summing up, the report adds that “taking into account the expenses to which his position subjects him and judging by the home that he is able to maintain, the American university teacher in many cases lives essentially as do men of the skilled mechanic class.... It would perhaps be generally conceded that a reasonable standard for the economic level for a professor after twenty-five years of service would be the amount of money necessary to maintain a home in a ten-room house, which he owns free of mortgage, to keep one servant and pay for some occasional service, and to provide an education for his children in preparatory school, college, and professional school on an equality with that obtained by the general run of students in this University. From the costs of various modes of living shown above [in the report], it appears that life at this level in New Haven now comes to about $15,000 or $16,000 a year.”

It is well known to those familiar with the situation of other intellectual workers that they find themselves in the same plight as the teachers in every case in which they do not sell their product in a mass-market, but before carrying the argument further I must touch on one more point in connection with the teachers. In another recent report[3] covering 302 colleges with 11,361 faculty members, it is stated that the average salary paid instructors, assistant or associate professors, and professors was $2,958. This compares with $1,724 in 1914-15. If we take that year as par and accept the usual comparison of the value of the dollar now as 61.7 cents, we find that in purchasing power the present average salary is $1,825, or about six per cent more than eleven years previously. It is evident therefore that the present crisis and deep discontent among intellectual workers is not due, or due only in small part, merely to the depreciated value of money. We must seek the cause elsewhere.

It is due in my opinion mainly to two things, both of which derive largely from mass production, namely, a rapidly altered standard and ideal of living, and a vast and equally rapid shift in the economic positions of the various classes of society.

Mass production, for the manufacturer, greatly decreases the cost of production, and selling in vast quantities greatly increases profits. There will come a time for almost every product when the inertia of selling it in a market already fairly saturated with it will increase the selling cost to such an extent as may more than equal the decreased cost of production, as is already occurring in certain lines. But meanwhile mass production has created enormous profits. In some cases and to some extent, though much fewer and less than generally assumed, the consumer has shared in these profits through lowered retail prices. The rest of the increased profit has gone in part to the workmen and, in much larger part, to the owners of the plants. In some lines, notably ready-made clothes for men, the prices of which are two and a half times those of 1912, the consumer has not benefited at all.

A generation ago the range of goods which even the rich might buy was comparatively restricted, and the scale at expenditure for practically every one was moderate. Today there is an almost unlimited range, and although mass production may have put innumerable things at the disposal of the public, the cost of living has not only been enormously increased by them (as in the case of the automobile which absorbed on the average six per cent of the total expense of the University of California faculty), but the constant assault on people’s minds by the most insidious sort of advertising makes these things appear necessities. Mass production requires mass sales, and mass sales require that the public shall be made to believe in the necessity of buying. The ideal of the modern business man is not to supply wants but to create them. America has always been a mass-minded country, and the modern sales manager not only appeals to the individual in creating new wants but enlists on his side the whole force of social opinion. His effort is directed not only at making an individual desire a certain article for itself but at making him feel that his standing in the community and the welfare of his wife and children depend upon their having it.

Mass-production salesmanship thus develops throughout all society a vast number of new and formerly unfelt wants, wants based on the things themselves or on social prestige. If these wants are satisfied by purchase the family expense is greatly increased. If the individual resists when others of his own class, and more particularly those formerly considered as in a lower social or economic class, buy freely, he feels himself sinking in the social scale in a country in which the “standard of living” has come to have wholly a material significance. Moreover, many of these new things, such as the automobile and telephone, become literal necessities, when they become so common as to create a new social life based upon their possession. As I pointed out in an earlier chapter a very considerable part of the increased cost of living is due to the so-called higher scale of living, so that a comparison between the increase of salaries and the increase in the cost of certain goods is no indication at all of the increased difficulty of living.

The scientific inventions and new commercial products of the past twenty years would, in any case, have made their appeal to such classes in the community as could have afforded them, but the complete change in the American mode of life and the consequent cost which has engulfed us all like a tidal wave would not have occurred had it not been for mass production. No one is troubled by not having something of which he has never heard, and he is not greatly so by not being able to have something which no one has whom he is ever likely to know personally. For example, it could not have troubled a college professor or writer in 1890 that he had not an automobile. It does not trouble him today that he cannot have a private five-hundred-foot ocean-going yacht like Vincent Astor. It is not wholly a question of keeping up with the Joneses. Having a $2,000 car when one ought to have only a Ford is sheer ostentation, but having some car in the country is now a necessity unless one is going to cut one’s self and one’s family off from a very large part of social “neighborhood” as well as from the pleasures that all one’s friends, practically without exception, are enjoying. The fact that today “everyone is having everything,” whether they pay for it or not, is due to advertising and “high-powered salesmanship,” and these are due primarily to mass production which requires mass markets.

But even these would not have been sufficient to alter so completely the status and peace of mind of the intellectual worker had it not been for the other effect of mass production mentioned above, that is, the shift in the economic status of the other classes. Formerly, although the intellectual worker occupied a comparatively low position in the economic scale, he was distinctly above the laboring class, and even between him and the successful business man there was no unbridgable gulf. Between the home of the college professor, clergyman, or author and that of the business man there was a difference in degree but not in kind. The intellectual, like his business acquaintance, could have decent living quarters for his family and a maid to relieve his wife of the heaviest household duties, and make his home an expression of himself.

Today the intellectual finds his life and status attacked both from above and below. Whatever may be the other and somewhat problematic results of mass production, it has assuredly made the rich incredibly richer than they ever were before. Ford, who has refused an offer of one billion dollars’ cash for his plant, and who, in his incorporated form, keeps a balance at the bank of four hundred millions, is only a glaring example of what has been going on all around us. The same figures that represented the entire capital values of considerable fortunes twenty years ago represent today but the annual incomes of the fortunate transient war profiteers or permanent mass producers. This colossal increase in the wealth of the wealthy is tending to place a complete gulf between classes and at the same time to establish unprecedented standards of living.

Though it may seem a minor matter, take for example the question of furnishing a home. If the laws of imitation are of great power in society, so is that which makes expressing one’s own personality one of the joys of life. The masters of mass production may preach the benefits of standardization but they themselves are exempt from the process. “A standardized print on your wall is just the thing for you,” say they, while, like Mr. Mellon, they are reported to bid Count Czernin a million dollars for a Vermeer. “Standardized furniture is just the thing for the home,” they preach from magazines while they sweep the market clean, at fabulous prices, of the fine old bits that even the most modest collector might have hoped to pick up with luck twenty years ago, until they have forced even the richest museums to forgo purchase. The intellectuals, because they are intellectual, are among the most insistent of human beings against being standardized. The mass production managers feed them Ford cars, Victrolas, cheap prints and other forms of _panes et circenses_ and tell them they should be satisfied, while they themselves by the power of their wealth, and in their frantic endeavor to escape standardized homes for themselves, bid fantastic prices against one another for old silver, chairs, tables, pictures, and every product of non-machine-made art and artisanship. The average man today, who wishes to make his home, sees everything but standardized articles soaring into the financial heavens above like toy balloons escaped from a child’s hand. It is symptomatic of much else in a new world suffering from colossal and concentrated wealth. The intellectual finds himself deprived of more and more in comparison with the business man, and shoved downward into the general undistinguished standardized mass.

But if he is shoved downward by the effect of the mass production wealth above him, he also has had a serious blow from the mass production wages of the classes below him. All wages have felt the effects of the mass production scales, and the result is that while the wealthy can pay the $900 or $1,000 demanded by a maid, the intellectual worker’s wife does the cooking and laundry, as we saw above. Is it any wonder, as a man watches his wife, who perhaps has as good a mind as his own, spend her days over the range and the tub in order that he may use his own mind to the best advantage, that he wonders what is ahead for her and the children and meditates escape for all of them from the plight into which they have been plunged? In a less material civilization, such as that of France, where, moreover, intellectual work has social recognition and reward quite apart from its financial, the plight is in many respects less serious even in the face of what Americans would consider poverty.

Such an escape, as we have just suggested, however, if made, has two aspects, the individual and the social. Frequently it is not difficult to make. It may be a complete flight from the intellectual to the business world, as has been and is being made by many. Or it may take the form of adapting one’s intellectual product to mass consumption. One may try for the movies, preach sensational sermons, become a popular lecturer, write text books, or, if one has been writing for the serious magazines, try to learn the trick of writing for those with circulation in millions; and quadruple one’s income or even amass a fortune. All the methods of escape suggested, however, entail for the individual a warping of the characteristic bent of his mind and generally a serious degeneration in his intellectual quality and character.

The escape thus has its social aspect. America already has, probably, the lowest grade mental life of any of the great modern nations. It can ill afford to destroy what intellectual life it has and force all intellectual and artistic individualism into the mass pattern. At the end of that road lies an Assyria, a Babylon, a Carthage. Not only can a nation not continue to function humanely with a large part of its intellectual life suppressed, but it may be asked whether it can permanently continue to function at all. The rich may buy up all the old furniture and paintings in the world, but without new mind it would seem as though a machine civilization based on science must perish. All of our practical business men and inventors are now dependent in the last analysis on the pure scientist, the man whose thought and experiments bear no apparent relation to the practical life. The business man may consider the intellectual a crank and of no account in a practical world unless he submits to mass production and rolls up royalties that can be understood even by a realtor, but the intellectual life is all of a piece and it may be questioned whether a nation that gauges its values by purely material standards and yet at the same time reduces its intellectual workers below the economic level of a freight-car conductor can continue indefinitely to produce even the pure scientist. As M. Herriot said in an address to the students of the Sorbonne last July, “ne croyez pas à l’artificielle distinction des sciences et des lettres.... Les faits sont innombrables et les formes infinies. Au-dessus de tout, il y a l’esprit, maître du monde.”

Europe might supply us with ideas in exchange for dollars but I see no remedy for our own intellectual life except a gradually growing sense of the real values of civilization on the part of the people. If business men consider a railway conductor a more important person than a professor, they will, quite apart from the law of supply and demand, give him a larger salary, and provide for college buildings rather than for the men who alone can give the buildings any significance. The problem comes back, as most do, to what people consider the real values in life. If, in the overwhelming mass of the population, those values are material and not spiritual, one cannot expect the spiritual life to flourish.

Of course for the intellectual worker of any sort, Grub Street has always been in the background, and a teacher, writer, or artist is probably further removed from the fear of starvation and the gutter today than perhaps ever before. It may also be conceded that the intellectuals should lead the way in renunciation and a sane ordering of life. But it must be remembered that in America owing to mass _mores_ the individual (with his family) is infinitely less free to lead his own life in his own way and yet retain social contacts with others than he is in almost any country in Europe. To a considerable extent, it is only after he has conformed to the material American standards that his real spiritual freedom and influence in personal relationships, begin. Moreover, whereas in Europe one can both preach and practise renunciation of the material for the sake of the spiritual, the doctrine in this country is considered un-American, and if carried out by many would obviously bring the whole system of mass production crashing about our ears. This is readily understood by the business leaders, who are the real heroes and ideals of the people. The last thing in the world that they want either preached or practised is the simple life. The intellectual here, therefore, who is himself quite content to live that life and do his creative work without any thought of competing for rewards with the business man, finds solidly aligned against such a scheme of living not only the mass production wage scales which make the cost of almost any decent living prohibitive, but also the opinion of a spiritually unawakened public singularly bent upon forcing conformity to its own standards, and the opinion of the interested leaders of the public, the business men whose own profits now depend upon the public’s becoming more and more materialistic.

The gigantic powers of manufacturing now in existence require for their profitable exploitation that the public shall be made steadily to develop new wants, wants that can be satisfied only by manufactured articles. Hoover and others may prate all they like about the concurrent need of an intellectual and spiritual life, but how is that life to develop if people are to be made to use their whole energies in satisfying new wants on the material plane? Yet if, on the one hand, they do not so grow, and, on the other, the intellectual classes become steadily more pinched between the two classes benefiting by mass production,—the owners above setting ever higher standards of living and the operatives below pressing steadily past them in an orgy of material well-being,—what will become of the intellectuals and how long will they continue to struggle and deny themselves, and have their wives do the laundry, in a civilization which will more and more look down upon their lack of earning power and their declining economic and social status?

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Getting and Spending at the Professional Standard of Living. By J. B. Peixotto. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1927.

[2] Incomes and Living Costs of a University Faculty. Edited by Y. Henderson and M. D. Davis. New Haven: Yale University Press. 1928.

[3] Teachers’ Salaries 1926-7. By Trevor Arnett. General Education Board. 1928.