<h2>SOME ORGANIZATIONS</h2>
<p>"What strikes and frightens the backward European as much as anything in
the United States is the efficiency and fearful universality of the
telephone. Just as I think of the big cities as agglomerations pierced
everywhere by elevator-shafts full of movement, so I think of them as
being threaded, under pavements and over roofs and between floors and
ceilings and between walls, by millions upon millions of live filaments
that unite all the privacies of the organism—and destroy them in order
to make one immense publicity! I do not mean that Europe has failed to
adopt the telephone, nor that in Europe there are no hotels with the
dreadful curse of an active telephone in every room. But I do mean that
the European telephone is a toy, and a somewhat clumsy one, compared
with the inexorable seriousness of the American telephone. Many
otherwise highly civilized Europeans are as timid in addressing a
telephone as they would be in addressing a royal sovereign. The average
European middle-class householder still speaks of his telephone, if he
has one, in the same falsely casual tone as the corresponding American
is liable to speak of his motor-car. It is naught—a negligible
trifle—but somehow it comes into the conversation!</p>
<p>"How odd!" you exclaim. And you are right. It is we Europeans who are
wrong, through no particular fault of our own.</p>
<p>The American is ruthlessly logical about the telephone. The only
occasion on which I was in really serious danger of being taken for a
madman in the United States was when, in a Chicago hotel, I permanently
removed the receiver from the telephone in a room designed (doubtless
ironically) for slumber. The whole hotel was appalled. Half Chicago
shuddered. In response to the prayer of a deputation from the management
I restored the receiver. On the horrified face of the deputation I could
read the unspoken query: "Is it conceivable that you have been in this
country a month without understanding that the United States is
primarily nothing but a vast congeries of telephone-cabins?" Yes, I
yielded and admired! And I surmise that on my next visit I shall find a
telephone on every table of every restaurant that respects itself.</p>
<div><br/></div>
<div class="figcenter"> <SPAN name="p074" id="p074"></SPAN> <ANTIMG src="images/p074.jpg" alt="AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE" title="AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE" /></div>
<p class="center"><b>AT MORN POURING CONFIDENCES INTO HER TELEPHONE</b></p>
<div><br/></div>
<div><br/></div>
<p>It is the efficiency of the telephone that makes it irresistible to a
great people whose passion is to "get results"—the instancy with which
the communication is given, and the clear loudness of the telephone's
voice in reply to yours: phenomena utterly unknown in Europe. Were I to
inhabit the United States, I too should become a victim of the telephone
habit, as it is practised in its most advanced form in those suburban
communities to which I have already incidentally referred at the end of
the previous chapter. There a woman takes to the telephone as women in
more decadent lands take to morphia. You can see her at morn at her
bedroom window, pouring confidences into her telephone, thus
combining the joy of an innocent vice with the healthy freshness of
breeze and sunshine. It has happened to me to sit in a drawing-room,
where people gathered round the telephone as Europeans gather round a
fire, and to hear immediately after the ejaculation of a number into the
telephone a sharp ring from outside through the open window, and then to
hear in answer to the question, "What are you going to wear to-night?"
two absolutely simultaneous replies, one loudly from the telephone
across the room, and the other faintlier from a charming human voice
across the garden: "I don't know. What are you?" Such may be the
pleasing secondary scientific effect of telephoning to the lady next
door on a warm afternoon.</p>
<p>Now it was obvious that behind the apparently simple exterior aspects of
any telephone system there must be an intricate and marvelous secret
organization. In Europe my curiosity would probably never have been
excited by the thought of that organization—at home one accepts
everything as of course!—but, in the United States, partly because the
telephone is so much more wonderful and terrible there, and partly
because in a foreign land one is apt to have strange caprices, I allowed
myself to become the prey of a desire to see the arcanum concealed at
the other end of all the wires; and thus, one day, under the high
protection of a demigod of the electrical world, I paid a visit to a
telephone-exchange in New York, and saw therein what nine hundred and
ninety-nine out of every thousand of the most ardent telephone-users
seldom think about and will never see.</p>
<p>A murmuring sound, as of an infinity of scholars in a prim school
conning their lessons, and a long row of young women seated in a dim
radiance on a long row of precisely similar stools, before a long
apparatus of holes and pegs and pieces of elastic cord, all extremely
intent: that was the first broad impression. One saw at once that none
of these young women had a single moment to spare; they were all
involved in the tremendous machine, part of it, keeping pace with it and
in it, and not daring to take their eyes off it for an instant, lest
they should sin against it. What they were droning about it was
impossible to guess; for if one stationed oneself close to any
particular rapt young woman, she seemed to utter no sound, but simply
and without ceasing to peg and unpeg holes at random among the thousands
of holes before her, apparently in obedience to the signaling of faint,
tiny lights that in thousands continually expired and were rekindled.
(It was so that these tiny lights should be distinguishable that the
illumination of the secret and finely appointed chamber was kept dim.)
Throughout the whole length of the apparatus the colored elastic cords
to which the pegs were attached kept crossing one another in fantastic
patterns.</p>
<p>We who had entered were ignored. We might have been ghosts, invisible
and inaudible. Even the supervisors, less-young women set in authority,
did not turn to glance at us as they moved restlessly peering behind the
stools. And yet somehow I could hear the delicate shoulders of all the
young women saying, without speech: "Here come these tyrants and
taskmasters again, who have invented this exercise which nearly but not
quite cracks our little brains for us! They know exactly how much they
can get out of us, and they get it. They are cleverer than us and more
powerful than us; and we have to submit to their discipline. But—" And
afar off I could hear: "What are you going to wear to-night?" "Will you
dine with me to-night?" "I want two seats." "Very well, thanks, and how
is Mrs....?" "When can I see you to-morrow?" "I'll take your offer for
those bonds." ... And I could see the interiors of innumerable offices
and drawing-rooms.... But of course I could hear and see nothing really
except the intent drone and quick gesturing of those completely absorbed
young creatures in the dim radiance, on stools precisely similar.</p>
<p>I understood why the telephone service was so efficient. I understood
not merely from the demeanor of the long row of young women, but from
everything else I had seen in the exact and diabolically ingenious
ordering of the whole establishment.</p>
<p>We were silent for a time, as though we had entered a church. We were,
perhaps unconsciously, abashed by the intensity of the absorption of
these neat young women. After a while one of the guides, one of the
inscrutable beings who had helped to invent and construct the astounding
organism, began in a low voice on the forlorn hope of making me
comprehend the mechanism of a telephone-call and its response. And I
began on the forlorn hope of persuading him by intelligent acting that I
did comprehend. We each made a little progress. I could not tell him
that, though I genuinely and humbly admired his particular variety of
genius, what interested me in the affair was not the mechanics, but the
human equation. As a professional reader of faces, I glanced as well as
I could sideways at those bent girls' faces to see if they were happy.
An absurd inquiry! Do <i>I</i> look happy when I'm at work, I wonder! Did
they then look reasonably content? Well, I came to the conclusion that
they looked like most other faces—neither one thing nor the other.
Still, in a great establishment, I would sooner search for sociological
information in the faces of the employed than in the managerial rules.</p>
<p>"What do they earn?" I asked, when we emerged from the ten-atmosphere
pressure of that intense absorption. (Of course I knew that no young
women could possibly for any length of time be as intensely absorbed as
these appeared to be. But the illusion was there, and it was effective.)</p>
<p>I learned that even the lowest beginner earned five dollars a week. It
was just the sum I was paying for a pair of clean sheets every night at
a grand hotel. And that the salary rose to six, seven, eight, eleven,
and even fourteen dollars for supervisors, who, however, had to stand on
their feet seven and a half hours a day, as shop-girls do for ten hours
a day; and that in general the girls had thirty minutes for lunch, and a
day off every week, and that the Company supplied them gratuitously with
tea, coffee, sugar, couches, newspapers, arm-chairs, and fresh air, of
which last fifty fresh cubic feet were pumped in for every operator
every minute.</p>
<p>"Naturally," I was told, "the discipline is strict. There are test
wires.... We can check the 'time elements.' ... We keep a record of
every call. They'll take a dollar a week less in an outside place—for
instance, a hotel.... Their average stay here is thirty months."</p>
<p>And I was told the number of exchanges there were in New York, exactly
like the one I was seeing.</p>
<p>A dollar a week less in a hotel! How feminine! And how masculine! And
how wise for one sort of young woman, and how foolish for another!...
Imagine quitting that convent with its guaranteed fresh air, and its
couches and sugar and so on, for the rough hazards and promiscuities of
a hotel! On the other hand, imagine not quitting it!</p>
<p>Said the demigod of the electrical world, condescendingly: "All this
telephone business is done on a mere few hundred horse-power. Come away,
and I'll show you electricity in bulk."</p>
<p>And I went away with him, thoughtful. In spite of the inhuman perfection
of its functioning, that exchange was a very human place indeed. It
brilliantly solved some problems; it raised others. Excessively
difficult to find any fault whatever in it! A marvelous service,
achieved under strictly hygienic conditions—and young women must make
their way through the world! And yet—Yes, a very human place indeed!</p>
<hr style='width: 45%;' />
<p>The demigods of the electric world do not condescend to move about in
petrol motor-cars. In the exercise of a natural and charming coquetry
they insist on electrical traction, and it was in the most modern and
soundless electric brougham that we arrived at nightfall under the
overhanging cornice-eaves of two gigantic Florentine palaces—just such
looming palaces, they appeared in the dark, as may be seen in any
central street of Florence, with a cinema-show blazing its signs on the
ground floor, and Heaven knows what remnants of Italian aristocracy in
the mysterious upper stories. Having entered one of the palaces,
simultaneously with a tornado of wind, we passed through long, deserted,
narrow galleries, lined with thousands of small, caged compartments
containing "transformers," and on each compartment was a label bearing
always the same words: "Danger, 6,600 volts." "Danger, 6,600 volts."
"Danger, 6,600 volts." A wondrous relief when we had escaped with our
lives from the menace of those innumerable volts! And then we stood on a
high platform surrounded by handles, switches, signals—apparatus enough
to put all New York into darkness, or to annihilate it in an instant by
the unloosing of terrible cohorts of volts!—and faced an enormous white
hall, sparsely peopled by a few colossal machines that seemed to be
revolving and oscillating about their business with the fatalism of
conquered and resigned leviathans. Immaculately clean, inconceivably
tidy, shimmering with brilliant light under its lofty and beautiful
ceiling, shaking and roaring with the terrific thunder of its own
vitality, this hall in which no common voice could make itself heard
produced nevertheless an effect of magical stillness, silence, and
solitude. We were alone in it, save that now and then in the far-distant
spaces a figure might flit and disappear between the huge glinting
columns of metal. It was a hall enchanted and inexplicable. I understood
nothing of it. But I understood that half the electricity of New York
was being generated by its engines of a hundred and fifty thousand
horse-power, and that if the spell were lifted the elevators of New York
would be immediately paralyzed, and the twenty million lights expire
beneath the eyes of a startled population. I could have gazed at it to
this day, and brooded to this day upon the human imaginations that had
perfected it; but I was led off, hypnotized, to see the furnaces and
boilers under the earth. And even there we were almost alone, to such an
extent had one sort of senseless matter been compelled to take charge of
another sort of senseless matter. The odyssey of the coal that was
lifted high out of ships on the tide beyond, to fall ultimately into the
furnaces within, scarcely touched by the hand-wielded shovel, was by
itself epical. Fresh air pouring in at the rate of twenty-four million
cubic feet per hour cooled the entire palace, and gave to these
stoke-holes the uncanny quality of refrigerators. The lowest horror of
the steamship had been abolished here.</p>
<p>I was tempted to say: "This alone is fit to be called the heart of New
York!"</p>
<p>They took me to the twin palace, and on the windy way thither figures
were casually thrown at me. As that a short circuit may cause the
machines to surge wildly into the sudden creation of six million
horse-power of electricity, necessitating the invention of other
machines to control automatically these perilous vagaries! As that in
the down-town district the fire-engine was being abolished because, at a
signal, these power-houses could in thirty seconds concentrate on any
given main a pressure of three hundred pounds to the square inch,
lifting jets of water perhaps above the roofs of sky-scrapers! As that
the city could fine these power-houses at the rate of five hundred
dollars a minute for any interruption of the current longer than three
minutes—but the current had never failed for a single second! As that
in one year over two million dollars' worth of machinery had been
scrapped!... And I was aware that it was New York I was in, and not
Timbuctoo.</p>
<p>In the other palace it appeared that the great American scrapping
process was even yet far from complete. At first sight this other seemed
to resemble the former one, but I was soon instructed that the former
one was as naught to this one, for here the turbine—the "strong, silent
man" among engines—was replacing the racket of cylinder and crank.
Statistics are tiresome and futile to stir the imagination. I disdain
statistics, even when I assimilate them. And yet when my attention was
directed to one trifling block of metal, and I was told that it was the
most powerful "unit" in the world, and that it alone would make
electricity sufficient for the lighting of a city of a quarter of a
million people, I felt that statistics, after all, could knock you a
staggering blow.... In this other palace, too, was the same solitude of
machinery, attending most conscientiously and effectively to itself. A
singularly disconcerting spectacle! And I reflected that, according to
dreams already coming true, the telephone-exchange also would soon be a
solitude of clicking contact-points, functioning in mystic certitude,
instead of a convent of girls requiring sugar and couches, and thirsting
for love. A singularly disconcerting prospect!</p>
<p>But was it necessary to come to America in order to see and describe
telephone-exchanges and electrical power-houses? Do not these wonders
exist in all the cities of earth? They do, but not to quite the same
degree of wondrousness. Hat-shops, and fine hat-shops, exist in New
York, but not to quite the same degree of wondrousness as in Paris.
People sing in New York, but not with quite the same natural lyricism as
in Naples. The great civilizations all present the same features; but it
is just the differences in degree between the same feature in this
civilization and in that—it is just these differences which together
constitute and illustrate the idiosyncrasy of each. It seems to me that
the brains and the imagination of America shone superlatively in the
conception and ordering of its vast organizations of human beings, and
of machinery, and of the two combined. By them I was more profoundly
attracted, impressed, and inspired than by any other non-spiritual
phenomena whatever in the United States. For me they were the proudest
material achievements, and essentially the most poetical achievements,
of the United States. And that is why I am dwelling on them.</p>
<hr style='width: 45%;' />
<p>Further, there are business organizations in America of a species which
do not flourish at all in Europe. For example, the "mail-order house,"
whose secrets were very generously displayed to me in Chicago—a
peculiar establishment which sells merely everything (except
patent-medicines)—on condition that you order it by post. Go into that
house with money in your palm, and ask for a fan or a flail or a
fur-coat or a fountain-pen or a fiddle, and you will be requested to
return home and write a letter about the proposed purchase, and stamp
the letter and drop it into a mail-box, and then to wait till the
article arrives at your door. That house is one of the most spectacular
and pleasing proofs that the inhabitants of the United States are thinly
scattered over an enormous area, in tiny groups, often quite isolated
from stores. On the day of my visit sixty thousand letters had been
received, and every executable order contained in these was executed
before closing time, by the co-ordinated efforts of over four thousand
female employees and over three thousand males. The conception would
make Europe dizzy. Imagine a merchant in Moscow trying to inaugurate
such a scheme!</p>
<p>A little machine no bigger than a soup-plate will open hundreds of
envelops at once. They are all the same, those envelops; they have even
less individuality than sheep being sheared, but when the contents of
one—any one at random—are put into your hand, something human and
distinctive is put into your hand. I read the caligraphy on a blue sheet
of paper, and it was written by a woman in Wyoming, a neat, earnest,
harassed, and possibly rather harassing woman, and she wanted all sorts
of things and wanted them intensely—I could see that with clearness.
This complex purchase was an important event in her year. So far as her
imagination went, only one mail-order would reach the Chicago house that
morning, and the entire establishment would be strained to meet it.</p>
<p>Then the blue sheet was taken from me and thrust into the system, and
therein lost to me. I was taken to a mysteriously rumbling shaft of
broad diameter, that pierced all the floors of the house and had
trap-doors on each floor. And when one of the trap-doors was opened I
saw packages of all descriptions racing after one another down spiral
planes within the shaft. There were several of these great shafts—with
divisions for mail, express, and freight traffic—and packages were
ceaselessly racing down all of them, laden with the objects desired by
the woman of Wyoming and her fifty-nine-thousand-odd fellow-customers of
the day. At first it seemed to me impossible that that earnest,
impatient woman in Wyoming should get precisely what she wanted; it
seemed to me impossible that some mistake should not occur in all that
noisy fever of rushing activity. But after I had followed an order, and
seen it filled and checked, my opinion was that a mistake would be the
most miraculous phenomenon in that establishment. I felt quite reassured
on behalf of Wyoming.</p>
<p>And then I was suddenly in a room where six hundred billing-machines
were being clicked at once by six hundred young women, a fantastic aural
nightmare, though none of the young women appeared to be conscious that
anything bizarre was going on.... And then I was in a printing-shop,
where several lightning machines spent their whole time every day in
printing the most popular work of reference in the United States, a
bulky book full of pictures, with an annual circulation of five and a
half million copies—the general catalogue of the firm. For the first
time I realized the true meaning of the word "popularity "—and
sighed....</p>
<p>And then it was lunch-time for about a couple of thousand employees,
and in the boundless restaurant I witnessed the working of the devices
which enabled these legions to choose their meals, and pay for them
(cost price) in a few moments, and without advanced mathematical
calculations. The young head of the restaurant showed me, with pride, a
menu of over a hundred dishes—Austrian, German, Hungarian, Italian,
Scotch, French, and American; at prices from one cent up as high as ten
cents (prime roast-beef)—and at the foot of the menu was his personal
appeal: "<i>I</i> desire to extend to you a cordial invitation to inspect,"
etc. "<i>My</i> constant aim will be," etc. Yet it was not <i>his</i> restaurant.
It was the firm's restaurant. Here I had a curious illustration of an
admirable characteristic of American business methods that was always
striking me—namely, the real delegation of responsibility. An American
board of direction will put a man in charge of a department, as a
viceroy over a province, saying, as it were: "This is yours. Do as you
please with it. We will watch the results." A marked contrast this with
the centralizing of authority which seems to be ever proceeding in
Europe, and which breeds in all classes at all ages—especially in
France—a morbid fear and horror of accepting responsibility.</p>
<div><br/></div>
<div class="figcenter"> <SPAN name="p086" id="p086"></SPAN> <ANTIMG src="images/p086.jpg" alt="LUNCHEON IN A DOWN-TOWN CLUB" title="LUNCHEON IN A DOWN-TOWN CLUB" /></div>
<p class="center"><b>LUNCHEON IN A DOWN-TOWN CLUB</b></p>
<div><br/></div>
<div><br/></div>
<p>Later, I was on the ground level, in the midst of an enormous apparent
confusion—the target for all the packages and baskets, big and little,
that shot every instant in a continuous stream from those spiral planes,
and slid dangerously at me along the floors. Here were the packers. I
saw a packer deal with a collected order, and in this order were a
number of tiny cookery utensils, a four-cent curling-iron, a brush, and
two incredibly ugly pink china mugs, inscribed in cheap gilt
respectively with the words "Father" and "Mother." Throughout my stay in
America no moment came to me more dramatically than this moment, and
none has remained more vividly in my mind. All the daily domestic life
of the small communities in the wilds of the West and the Middle West,
and in the wilds of the back streets of the great towns, seemed to be
revealed to me by the contents of that basket, as the packer wrapped up
and protected one article after another. I had been compelled to abandon
a visitation of the West and of the small communities everywhere, and I
was sorry. But here in a microcosm I thought I saw the simple reality of
the backbone of all America, a symbol of the millions of the little
plain people, who ultimately make possible the glory of the
world-renowned streets and institutions in dazzling cities.</p>
<p>There was something indescribably touching in that curling-iron and
those two mugs. I could see the table on which the mugs would soon
proudly stand, and "father" and "mother" and children thereat, and I
could see the hand heating the curling-iron and applying it. I could see
the whole little home and the whole life of the little home.... And
afterward, as I wandered through the warehouses—pyramids of the same
chair, cupboards full of the same cheap violin, stacks of the same album
of music, acres of the same carpet and wallpaper, tons of the same
gramophone, hundreds of tons of the same sewing-machine and
lawn-mower—I felt as if I had been made free of the secrets of every
village in every State of the Union, and as if I had lived in every
little house and cottage thereof all my life! Almost no sense of beauty
in those tremendous supplies of merchandise, but a lot of honesty,
self-respect, and ambition fulfilled. I tell you I could hear the
engaged couples discussing ardently over the pages of the catalogue what
manner of bedroom suite they would buy, and what design of sideboard....</p>
<p>Finally, I arrived at the firm's private railway station, where a score
or more trucks were being laden with the multifarious boxes, bales, and
parcels, all to leave that evening for romantic destinations such as
Oregon, Texas, and Wyoming. Yes, the package of the woman of Wyoming's
desire would ultimately be placed somewhere in one of those trucks! It
was going to start off toward her that very night!</p>
<hr style='width: 45%;' />
<p>Impressive as this establishment was, finely as it illustrated the
national genius for organization, it yet lacked necessarily, on account
of the nature of its activity, those outward phenomena of splendor which
charm the stranger's eye in the great central houses of New York, and
which seem designed to sum up all that is most characteristic and most
dazzling in the business methods of the United States. These central
houses are not soiled by the touch of actual merchandise. Nothing more
squalid than ink ever enters their gates. They traffic with symbols
only, and the symbols, no matter what they stand for, are never in
themselves sordid. The men who have created these houses seem to have
realized that, from their situation and their importance, a special
effort toward representative magnificence was their pleasing duty, and
to have made the effort with a superb prodigality and an astounding
ingenuity.</p>
<p>Take, for a good, glorious example, the very large insurance company,
conscious that the eyes of the world are upon it, and that the entire
United States is expecting it to uphold the national pride. All the
splendors of all the sky-scrapers are united in its building. Its foyer
and grand staircase will sustain comparison with those of the Paris
Opéra. You might think you were going into a place of entertainment!
And, as a fact, you are! This affair, with nearly four thousand clerks,
is the huge toy and pastime of a group of millionaires who have
discovered a way of honestly amusing themselves while gaining applause
and advertisement. Within the foyer and beyond the staircase, notice the
outer rooms, partitioned off by bronze grilles, looming darkly gorgeous
in an eternal windowless twilight studded with the beautiful glowing
green disks of electric-lamp shades; and under each disk a human head
bent over the black-and-red magic of ledgers! The desired effect is at
once obtained, and it is wonderful. Then lose yourself in and out of the
ascending and descending elevators, and among the unending multitudes of
clerks, and along the corridors of marble (total length exactly measured
and recorded). You will be struck dumb. And immediately you begin to
recover your speech you will be struck dumb again....</p>
<p>Other houses, as has been seen, provide good meals for their employees
at cost price. This house, then, will provide excellent meals, free of
charge! It will install the most expensive kitchens and richly spacious
restaurants. It will serve the delicate repasts with dignity. "Does all
this lessen the wages?" No, not in theory. But in practice, and whether
the management wishes or not, it must come out of the wages. "Why do you
do it?" you ask the departmental chief, who apparently gets far more fun
out of the contemplation of these refectories than out of the
contemplation of premiums received and claims paid. "It is better for
the employees," he says. "But we do it because it is better for us. It
pays us. Good food, physical comfort, agreeable environment, scientific
ventilation—all these things pay us. We get results from them." He does
not mention horses, but you feel that the comparison is with horses. A
horse, or a clerk, or an artisan—it pays equally well to treat all of
them well. This is one of the latest discoveries of economic science, a
discovery not yet universally understood.</p>
<div><br/></div>
<div class="figcenter"> <SPAN name="p090" id="p090"></SPAN> <ANTIMG src="images/p090.jpg" alt="A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG" title="A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG" /></div>
<p class="center"><b>A YOUNG WOMAN WAS JUST FINISHING A FLORID SONG</b></p>
<div><br/></div>
<div><br/></div>
<p>I say you do not mention horses, and you certainly must not hint that
the men in authority may have been actuated by motives of humanity. You
must believe what you are told—that the sole motive is to get results.
The eagerness with which all heads of model establishments would disavow
to me any thought of being humane was affecting in its <i>naïveté</i>; it had
that touch of ingenuous wistfulness which I remarked everywhere in
America—and nowhere more than in the demeanor of many mercantile
highnesses. (I hardly expect Americans to understand just what I mean
here.) It was as if they would blush at being caught in an act of
humanity, like school-boys caught praying. Still, to my mind, the
white purity of their desire to get financial results was often muddied
by the dark stain of a humane motive. I may be wrong (as people say),
but I know I am not (as people think).</p>
<p>The further you advance into the penetralia of this arch-exemplar of
American organization and profusion, the more you are amazed by the
imaginative perfection of its detail: as well in the system of filing
for instant reference fifty million separate documents, as in the
planning of a concert-hall for the diversion of the human machines.</p>
<p>As we went into the immense concert-hall a group of girls were giving an
informal concert among themselves. When lunch is served on the premises
with chronographic exactitude, the thirty-five minutes allowed for the
meal give an appreciable margin for music and play. A young woman was
just finishing a florid song. The concert was suspended, and the whole
party began to move humbly away at this august incursion.</p>
<p>"Sing it again; do, please!" the departmental chief suggested. And the
florid song was nervously sung again; we applauded, the artiste bowed as
on a stage, and the group fled, the thirty-five minutes being doubtless
up. The departmental chief looked at me in silence, content, as much as
to say: "This is how we do business in America." And I thought, "Yet
another way of getting results!"</p>
<p>But sometimes the creators of the organization, who had provided
everything, had been obliged to confess that they had omitted from their
designs certain factors of evolution. Hat-cupboards were a feature of
the women's offices—delightful specimens of sound cabinetry. And still,
millinery was lying about all over the place, giving it an air of
feminine occupation that was extremely exciting to a student on his
travels. The truth was that none of those hats would go into the
cupboards. Fashion had worsted the organization completely. Departmental
chiefs had nothing to do but acquiesce in this startling untidiness.
Either they must wait till the circumference of hats lessened again, or
they must tear down the whole structure and rebuild it with due regard
to hats.</p>
<p>Finally, we approached the sacred lair and fastness of the president,
whose massive portrait I had already seen on several walls. Spaciousness
and magnificence increased. Ceilings rose in height, marble was softened
by the thick pile of carpets. Mahogany and gold shone more luxuriously.
I was introduced into the vast antechamber of the presidential
secretaries, and by the chief of them inducted through polished and
gleaming barriers into the presence-chamber itself: a noble apartment,
an apartment surpassing dreams and expectations, conceived and executed
in a spirit of majestic prodigality. The president had not been afraid.
And his costly audacity was splendidly justified of itself. This man had
a sense of the romantic, of the dramatic, of the fit. And the qualities
in him and his <i>état major</i> which had commanded the success of the
entire enterprise were well shown in the brilliant symbolism of that
room's grandiosity.... And there was the president's portrait again,
gorgeously framed.</p>
<p>He came in through another door, an old man of superb physique, and
after a little while he was relating to me the early struggles of his
company. "My wife used to say that for ten years she never saw me," he
remarked.</p>
<p>I asked him what his distractions were, now that the strain was over and
his ambitions so gloriously achieved. He replied that occasionally he
went for a drive in his automobile.</p>
<p>"And what do you do with yourself in the evenings?" I inquired.</p>
<p>He seemed a little disconcerted by this perhaps unaccustomed bluntness.</p>
<p>"Oh," he said, casually, "I read insurance literature."</p>
<p>He had the conscious mien and manners of a reigning prince. His courtesy
and affability were impeccable and charming. In the most profound sense
this human being had succeeded, for it was impossible to believe that,
had he to live his life again, he would live it very differently.</p>
<p>Such a type of man is, of course, to be found in nearly every country;
but the type flourishes with a unique profusion and perfection in the
United States; and in its more prominent specimens the distinguishing
idiosyncrasy of the average American successful man of business is
magnified for our easier inspection. The rough, broad difference between
the American and the European business man is that the latter is anxious
to leave his work, while the former is anxious to get to it. The
attitude of the American business man toward his business is
pre-eminently the attitude of an artist. You may say that he loves
money. So do we all—artists particularly. No stock-broker's private
journal could be more full of dollars than Balzac's intimate
correspondence is full of francs. But whereas the ordinary artist loves
money chiefly because it represents luxury, the American business man
loves it chiefly because it is the sole proof of success in his
endeavor. He loves his business. It is not his toil, but his hobby,
passion, vice, monomania—any vituperative epithet you like to bestow on
it! He does not look forward to living in the evening; he lives most
intensely when he is in the midst of his organization. His instincts are
best appeased by the hourly excitements of a good, scrimmaging
commercial day. He needs these excitements as some natures need alcohol.
He cannot do without them.</p>
<div><br/></div>
<div class="figcenter"> <SPAN name="p094" id="p094"></SPAN> <ANTIMG src="images/p094.jpg" alt="ABSORBED IN THAT WONDROUS SATISFYING HOBBY" title="ABSORBED IN THAT WONDROUS SATISFYING HOBBY" /></div>
<p class="center"><b>ABSORBED IN THAT WONDROUS SATISFYING HOBBY</b></p>
<div><br/></div>
<div><br/></div>
<p>On no other hypothesis can the unrivaled ingenuity and splendor and
ruthlessness of American business undertakings be satisfactorily
explained. They surpass the European, simply because they are never out
of the thoughts of their directors, because they are adored with a fine
frenzy. And for the same reason they are decked forth in magnificence.
Would a man enrich his office with rare woods and stuffs and marbles if
it were not a temple? Would he bestow graces on the environment if while
he was in it the one idea at the back of his head was the anticipation
of leaving it? Watch American business men together, and if you are a
European you will clearly perceive that they are devotees. They are open
with one another, as intimates are. Jealousy and secretiveness are much
rarer among them than in Europe. They show off their respective
organizations with pride and with candor. They admire one another
enormously. Hear one of them say enthusiastically of another: "It was a
great idea he had—connecting his New York and his Philadelphia places
by wireless—a great idea!" They call one another by their Christian
names, fondly. They are capable of wonderful friendships in business.
They are cemented by one religion—and it is not golf. For them the
journey "home" is often not the evening journey, but the morning
journey. Call this a hard saying if you choose: it is true. Could a man
be happy long away from a hobby so entrancing, a toy so intricate and
marvelous, a setting so splendid? Is it strange that, absorbed in that
wondrous satisfying hobby, he should make love with the nonchalance of
an animal? At which point I seem to have come dangerously near to the
topic of the singular position of the American woman, about which
everybody is talking....</p>
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<h2><SPAN name="V" id="V" />V</h2>
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