In a Time Like This

When a well-managed ship of the old sailing days entered her home harbor at the end of a blue-water voyage, she was a marvel of taut rigging, new paint, and freshly served gear. At no other time after her maiden departure was she so irreproachably shipshape. For all the work that was ever done on her above the water-line was done by her crew while she was going about her normal business. This task of overhauling and replacing was not undertaken, however, while she was running before a ten-knot breeze. At such times the watch on deck were fully occupied with merely carrying on, and so was all the ship’s gear. Where, then, was the work done that made her homecoming a glory to the eye and a credit to the owners? It was done in the calms of low latitudes. In the roaring forties, in the singing trades, it was enough just to sail the vessel. To get out the paint-pots and tar-buckets and watch-tackles and spun-yarn, to make her beautiful and fully efficient once more, to repair the ravages of the constant strain to which she had been subjected while logging her ten and twelve knots, her officers waited until she had entered the doldrums. They assumed as a matter of course that that was what the doldrums were for.

The analogy is worth a moment’s reflection now, while we are going through these economic and financial doldrums. It is historically obvious that any salutary adjustments that are made in the conduct of business or of everyday living have to be made in hard times—times of financial and psychic depression such as we are passing through. In a prosperous era, a decade of inflation, the whole crew and all the officers have their hands full merely trying to keep things going. When profits are piling up, there is little incentive and no encouragement to think of anything outside Business as Usual. But when business stagnates, profits dwindle, and want threatens, then we can be induced to think things over, if only because other outlets for our initiative are so clogged. We are open to suggestions and comparatively ready to face responsibilities. When larders are empty, people can be made to think about God: the great religious movements have occurred in lean times. When crops fail, people become agitated about their rights: the great charters of political liberty have been won by destitute folk. When the wind of prosperity stops blowing and industry stands still with idly flapping sails, that is the time of all times to paint, patch, replace, overhaul, tighten, and generally refurbish the craft.

In plain language, we as a people have lessons to learn, mistakes to rectify; and the depression is our chance to learn the lessons and rectify the mistakes. A time like this brings opportunities on the enormous scale of the damage it inflicts, and it is our privilege to wring from the disaster a permanent gain that will more than wipe out its great temporary cost. The chief danger ahead of us is not that we shall undergo want and starvation, great and real though that danger may be. No: the chief danger is that we shall go on overlooking the opportunity provided; that we shall insist upon trying to get out of the hard times through the same revolving door that let us into them, and remain content with a mere renewal of the conditions that produced the trouble and can as easily produce it again and again.

II

The world of 1928 and early 1929 created the conditions under which we groan today, just as surely as the world of 1900-1914 created the war. 1932 is not a disruption: it is a fulfillment. “Give us just what we had four years ago, only let it not lead to what it led to”—it is in human nature to pray that kind of prayer, but it is not in the nature of things to grant it. The whole present set of conditions under which we writhe is the inevitable outgrowth of the whole past set of conditions which we fatuously bless and would return to; the one is just as logical an expression of the other as a mature tree is of seed, soil, and climate.

It follows that we have learned nothing whatever until we have learned to abhor the causes along with the consequences. There is little hope for us so long as our minds continue to set up the bonanza year 1928 as the definition of all desirable things. Every 1928 means a 1932; every 1929 of history will include a fatal November; and we shall make nothing out of the tremendous opportunity offered us until we can whole-heartedly admit that bonanza and panic are the two faces of the same reality, as inseparable as the obverse and reverse of a coin. As soon as our minds clear-sightedly renounce the easy money of three and four years ago, then there will be sense and dignity in our outcry about the hardships of today. Until then, a good part of our present self-pity is meaningless emotionalism, like the howling of a child who has made himself ill with too much candy and at the first chance will do it again.

A good many of the candy-eaters of 1928 present an elaborate semi-statistical reason for their loyalty to the causes of their and our current illness. There is, they assure us, a mysterious law of nature whereby hard times and easy times succeed each other in regular cycles, and when deflation follows inflation we have only to wait philosophically for the return of the conditions which we desire. This swing-of-the-pendulum theory has been very successfully popularized by economists, whose elaborate mystifications on the subject are highly acceptable to all persons who had rather charge their troubles up to occult laws of nature than to their own short-sighted folly. Actually, the cycle of prosperity and depression is about as mysterious as the parallel natural phenomenon of getting drunk on borrowed money and sobering up afterward. We drank deeply of success a few years ago; it went to our heads; we behaved as drunkards behave, threw our easy money about in their lordly fashion, and admired ourselves. Now we come to with empty pockets, debts, a headache, and an impulse to vent our self-disgust on the man who sold us the liquor rather than on ourselves for buying it. The whole business is really about as mysterious as that—that is, a little too simple for most professional economists to understand.

What we have now, if we will only accept it, is an opportunity to get out of the mess not backward but forward— forward to something better than 1928 was, something not charged with the appalling future liabilities of that perilous and delusive year. But we cannot get this something better unless we undergo certain changes of heart and of mind. We shall need to reconsider the leaderships we have followed, to criticize and reassess more than one of the contemporary values which we accepted unthinkingly in the excitement and rush of what we mistook for prosperity. We shall need to abandon all this obstinate nonsense of idealizing the years just before the depression, and learn to construe those very years as the true calamity. It is imperative, indispensable, that we cease to want 1928 or anything like it.

Having got so far, we can settle down to the consideration in all sobriety of what it is that we really do want.

III

The central thesis of these paragraphs is that people have not been getting what they really want. This fact is basic and all-explanatory in any sober consideration of our present crisis. It is easy enough, in a highly organized industrial democracy, to make people take what they do not much want, or even to make them think they want it—as long as they feel prosperous. A large part of the general public will always be, in this respect, like children, who automatically take what they are given from parental or official sources, and accept it uncritically and rather omnivorously. In normal times, the public has only a remnant left of the old mental habit of considering the buyer’s perfect satisfaction with a purchase the first condition of his spending his money.

But let people receive a shock which jars their sense of values awake, let their assets become a little less fluid, their incomes a little shrunken or threatened with shrinkage, and you will see them recover the old habit with startling facility. You will see them stop buying the very things they have been heedlessly accepting as sheer necessities; and you will see this occur in the face of drastically lowered prices and a selling propaganda in excess of anything ever known. It is precisely what is occurring now. What it means is that we never really wanted many of the things we took for granted as proper and desirable to have. We got no true satisfaction out of them; but it required an earthquake to bring us to that amount of self-knowledge.

What, fundamentally, is the depression? Here is a new definition, one which tells, if not all, certainly most: The depression is the public’s repudiation of what it has found it does not want.

When that problematic being, the historian of the future, comes to write his summary of the first third of this century, especially in America, he may find that the chief identifying mark of our time is the extraordinary extent to which the agencies of supply have fallen out of touch with the actualities of demand. Everybody knows what the process has been: First, efficient production, quantity production, increases volume above natural demand and lowers unit costs. Secondly, the necessary demand is artificially worked up by endless promotion devices. Thirdly, this formula becomes the normal pattern, and legitimate and wanted articles not readily adaptable to it are discontinued. Finally, the ultimate consumer is reeducated away from his own requirements and preferences in the direction of someone else’s— the manufacturer’s or jobber’s—convenience. And then we have the paradox of the supply determining the demand, and the consumer tacitly accepting it as his role to play the game, support the general prosperity, and keep his money in circulation by taking what he is given and saying nothing.

The business which flourished in 1928 on the system of creating demand to supply would have flourished mightily enough if it had solved the problem of supplying true demand ; it would still be flourishing today in the midst of the depression; and if all or most businesses had been concerned with meeting instead of making demand, there would have been no depression. This very era is possibly the most promising time since the Civil War for any commercial enterprise founded exclusively on the idea of response to actual human desires and without any disposition to force its product into unwilling markets or seek self-enrichment through the promotion of its securities. Making people think they want what they do not want may be the most lucrative business in the world in the short run; but giving them what they want will always win in the end, and it happens to be about the only business field that is not today tragically overcrowded.

IV

Many persons who have long made their incomes out of manufactures, trading, the various processes of distribution and promotion, or speculative investment in these activities, are unable to imagine any diminution of their incomes which does not imply the decay of civilization, a threat to the underpinnings of society. To them, normality means first of all that their opportunities for making money shall increase at the rate to which they have become accustomed. Inevitably, these persons are now adjuring us to help keep things going as they have always gone. They are making it a test of patriotism, almost of religion, for us to keep on spending our money for the fruits of their overproduction while the prices are down. Usually they put their plea on the ground of our obligation to the country in a crisis, and especially on the ground of our duty to help keep down unemployment by supporting industry.

Their advice, if followed, will do us a huge disservice. To follow it is simply to prolong the same old cycle of blowing up a balloon beyond the tensile strength of the materials, being aghast when it bursts, patching the puncture, and blowing it up all over again. The present opportunity is for something better than that, or it is no opportunity at all.

We may as well face at once the fact that many incomes ought to come down, many businesses be liquidated entirely, many old kinds of production curtailed, many new kinds inaugurated, many social habits reconsidered. These matters have a claim to remain unchanged just so long as they give us what we want, and not longer. They are not the ultimate clue to the nation’s health. The test is how much contentment people in general are getting out of the fruits of our economic organization, how much release from vain frets, fevers, and strains, how much of the feeling of permanence and security in which alone is peace of mind.

There has been wholesale dislocation, and it will have to be met by frank relocation of many things and persons. To make any permanent difference to the underlying causes of unemployment may very likely cost the country a great deal more unemployment than there has ever yet been. This is a hard possibility for either the unemployed or the humane employer to consider; but it is more important that workers shall in the end be reemployed on a permanent basis at the right work than it is that they shall have temporary work at any cost, with an ever present liability to repetitions of the same calamity. Nothing has much importance beside the chance to make the present really contribute something toward a better future.

There are hundreds of thousands of folk who must find their way out of the cities to the suburbs, the small towns, the land. There are thousands who will have to abandon businesses for trades; business is a profession enormously overcrowded with those who have no vocation for it, and no equipment except a hankering to make money out of others’ thinking, Thousands of families must give up sending to colleges, universities, and expensive schools those sons and daughters who will never be educable material; their withdrawal will be an ultimate blessing to everyone concerned, and especially to the educational institutions. Other thousands of families must learn to eke out a little employment with a lot of sustenance gardening of the sort which many of us practiced against the threatened food shortage of the war, revelled in while doing it, and yet weakly abandoned when the pressure relaxed. Women who have been buying vast quantities of low-priced, ready-made clothing will do well to have a much smaller quantity of really good things made to their order—an opportunity, incidentally, to reedit the current fashion tendencies to the requirements of folk who have things to do.

V

And all of us must be much more careful than we have ever been in the matter of getting our money’s worth. We must grow out of the habit of rapid replacement of everything we use, and try to recover the old natural satisfactions of having a few comparatively good things, taking care of them because they are worth it, and spending with enough deliberation to get something of the pleasure of anticipation out of our purchases, as those folk do who have not always taken it for granted that they must instantly get every new thing they see or hear of. We must be more careful what uses we make of that economic mechanism, the installment plan of buying—one of the many social tools that have been encouraged to degenerate into tyrannical machines. A great many of us would be happier if we let charge accounts and self-indulgence be replaced by cash payment and some energetic experiments in doing without. After all, there is only just so much capacity in one life for the enjoyment of advantages, comforts, accessories. We divide this capacity among too many items, and so miss getting the proper enjoyment of any one of them.

All accounts agree that for the last year people have been shopping around for entertainment, and in a rather skeptical frame of mind. Books, plays, and motion pictures just like those which we accepted as a matter of course in the flush time are suddenly discovered to be not quite good enough to bother with. The producer who continues to offer us the same thing at a lower price and with more and more brazen advertising is fighting to stave off ruin, while the producer who quietly seizes the implied invitation to offer us less of a better article is doing all the business he can take care of. The sensible inference to draw is that the shows which are not good enough for us now were not really good enough when we were automatically taking them in.

That is the favor which the depression does us. It raises standards. Depressions are harsh critics. Well, we had better apply the same shopping-around tactics to other commodities than entertainment—to, in fact, as many commodities as we can. And there are plenty of them which we can very happily and efficiently do without. How many appliances are bought at great sacrifice to save time that no one make any permanent difference to the underlying causes of unemployment may very likely cost the country a great deal more unemployment than there has ever yet been. This is a hard possibility for either the unemployed or the humane employer to consider; but it is more important that workers shall in the end be reemployed on a permanent basis at the right work than it is that they shall have temporary work at any cost, with an ever present liability to repetitions of the same calamity. Nothing has much importance beside the chance to make the present really contribute something toward a better future.

There are hundreds of thousands of folk who must find their way out of the cities to the suburbs, the small towns, the land. There are thousands who will have to abandon businesses for trades; business is a profession enormously overcrowded with those who have no vocation for it, and no equipment except a hankering to make money out of others’ thinking. Thousands of families must give up sending to colleges, universities, and expensive schools those sons and daughters who will never be educable material; their withdrawal will be an ultimate blessing to everyone concerned, and especially to the educational institutions. Other thousands of families must learn to eke out a little employment with a lot of sustenance gardening of the sort which many of us practiced against the threatened food shortage of the war, revelled in while doing it, and yet weakly abandoned when the pressure relaxed. Women who have been buying vast quantities of low-priced, ready-made clothing will do well to have a much smaller quantity of really good things made to their order—an opportunity, incidentally, to reedit the current fashion tendencies to the requirements of folk who have things to do.

V

And all of us must be much more careful than we have ever been in the matter of getting our money’s worth. We must grow out of the habit of rapid replacement of everything we use, and try to recover the old natural satisfactions of having a few comparatively good things, taking care of them because they are worth it, and spending with enough deliberation to get something of the pleasure of anticipation out of our purchases, as those folk do who have not always taken it for granted that they must instantly get every new thing they see or hear of. We must be more careful what uses we make of that economic mechanism, the installment plan of buying—one of the many social tools that have been encouraged to degenerate into tyrannical machines. A great many of us would be happier if we let charge accounts and self-indulgence be replaced by cash payment and some energetic experiments in doing without. After all, there is only just so much capacity in one life for the enjoyment of advantages, comforts, accessories. We divide this capacity among too many items, and so miss getting the proper enjoyment of any one of them.

All accounts agree that for the last year people have been shopping around for entertainment, and in a rather skeptical frame of mind. Books, plays, and motion pictures just like those which we accepted as a matter of course in the flush time are suddenly discovered to be not quite good enough to bother with. The producer who continues to offer us the same thing at a lower price and with more and more brazen advertising is fighting to stave off ruin, while the producer who quietly seizes the implied invitation to offer us less of a better article is doing all the business he can take care of. The sensible inference to draw is that the shows which are not good enough for us now were not really good enough when we were automatically taking them in.

That is the favor which the depression does us. It raises standards. Depressions are harsh critics. Well, we had better apply the same shopping-around tactics to other commodities than entertainment—to, in fact, as many commodities as we can. And there are plenty of them which we can very happily and efficiently do without. How many appliances are bought at great sacrifice to save time that no one has any rational use for after it is saved! How many expensive self-operating toys are hung on Christmas trees for the brief boredom of young America—who would be better off and have more fun with a good jackknife and a pocket compass I There has been a great excess of the mechanical-toy element in our adult civilization, too. A man will fly across the continent to go to a prize fight—because his time is so valuable. The time-saving device and the time-killing device, resorted to by the same person on the same day, and without perception of absurdity!

On this continent there is many a small village in which a family of moderate size can live more comfortably and completely on twelve hundred dollars a year than the same family could live in New York City on twelve thousand dollars. This statement will sound fantastic to those who never tried both, but those who have tried will know that it is strictly, literally true. One of the pressing needs of the time is a greatly enlarged class of families who would rather have the village and be relatively rich on a small income than the city and be relatively poor on the larger one. Very few will go very hungry or very cold in the villages during the coming winter. A man can always find something to do in one of them, something to eat, and—what is quite as important to well-being—something to learn. And nearly all our villages (barring the areas of flood and other disasters for which man is not answerable) could absorb ten or fifteen per cent additional population without much strain, even in the most impoverished times. In these particulars they are the antithesis of the modern city.

On the plains of Nebraska a family of children weathered the panic of the ‘nineties on a diet of oatmeal almost exclusively. For three years they ate little else. When it was over, they thought they had suffered, and they hoped never to face another dish of oatmeal as long as they lived. In 1907, nearly grown up, they had the depression to confront in an Eastern city with a greatly and suddenly reduced family income. They had unpleasant experiences with bill-collectors after exhausting the leeway of their charge accounts, and at times their diet was very thin indeed for weeks on end. It now occurred to them with startling force that during the lean years in Nebraska there had at least been enough of the oatmeal. There are Maine towns that will have to eat more fish this season than they like or have eaten for a long time past; but they will have the fish.

VI

Let enough of the population get their affairs trimmed to hard times, and let trading settle down to the service of people who are undergoing hard times, know what they want or can afford, and do not mean to let anyone else tell them, and business will find that it has been saved in spite of itself. The situation will be taken advantage of, and presently dominated, by a new type of business man, or rather the reincarnation of an old type. His interest will be in business itself; that is, in what he can make that is desirable and necessary. He will require to make only so much money as his business needs for proper conduct and legitimate expansion; and he will never confuse his function in society with that of the financier, or use the arts and wiles of the promoter to turn his business into a field of speculative investment—a process which, in its effect upon the business man’s own definition of his task and attitude toward it, can be called nothing less than corruption.

It is, after all, corruption of our sense of values that we have to shun as the greatest evil that can befall our country or mankind. More than twenty years ago a distinguished Italian historian and publicist, Guglielmo Ferrero, surveyed modern industrial life in America and reported in substance that it would have only to keep on progressing in the same direction at the same pace to end in inevitable anarchy. Why? Because the quantity production of standardized things, the limitation of products to things easily producible by the application of quantity methods, was rapidly destroying taste and discrimination among the millions, by simple removal from their ken of the things on which taste naturally exercises itself. We were becoming, Ferrero maintained, a race to which one thing is as good as another, and which will take the thing that is offered it, just because it is offered. To such a race, one idea or one political system will eventually be as good as another, and no system at all will serve as well. Such a race would be at last incapable of making an issue of any difference except that between hunger and satiety—and what is that incapacity, that loss of the scale of values, if not anarchism?

An extravagant, over-logical speculation, possibly; but one not without its nucleus of truth. Impermanence itself is a kind of anarchy; and nobody can doubt that America has been too quick to assume that all change is growth, all replacement progress. Nothing is sound that destroys the race’s feeling of continuity—a good for the loss of which no amount of mechanical efficiency can compensate, and without which people cannot live, but only exist from day to day.

There is a part of the Flemish lowlands in which one of the valuable industries is brick-making out of a special kind of alluvial clay which exists in limited quantities. The families concerned in that industry—for it is a family affair essentially—could not work their brickyards today in peace of mind without the knowledge that their supply of raw material is assured for at least fifty years ahead. They take every precaution, by purchase, even by intermarriage, to gain the assurance of that half-century’s leeway, without which they would feel themselves to be in a precarious position and as stripped of dignity as the casual day laborer. Now, there is a reason for expanding an industry that will stand examination! Expansion in the interest of permanence! If you were to try to sell those families the idea of a big combine or merger of all their holdings and a scheme for turning all their clay into machine-made bricks in a decade, and if you were to use as an argument the vastly increased income that would accrue to each of them for that decade, they would hardly know what you might be talking about. The proposal would strike them as a form of communal suicide. For they know what they want; and what they want is continuity. It is a pretty good thing to want. Among other virtues, it is a fairly sure preventive of the modern malaise called industrial unrest.

No one is likely to suggest, or to hope, that American life will resolve itself into family industries based on such units of time as fifty years. But there is something for us in the underlying aspiration; and an era such as this of the early 1930’s is the time of times for us to dwell on the idea and extract its meaning.

The depression really has made the country undergo a social experience parallel to the traditionary religious experience known as “conviction of sin.” There must be a great many persons who are finding our civilization slightly noisy and crowded and who would like to get away from the racket now and then into a place where they can hear themselves think. There must be a great many thousands of new recruits to the cause of those who agree with De Quincey that a man who has not in his life had a fair share of solitude knows nothing about himself, and hence not much about anything.

The ill wind has blown us no end of an opportunity: perhaps we shall grasp it. What it principally requires of us is the perception of some facts so simple that no man has to be a seer to master them. For instance: It takes a long time to grow hard wood, and comparatively little to grow soft; but if you want to build something to last, you do well to forget the economic advantages of spruce and remember the structural advantages of oak. The soil of American civilization is still all right for the production of things slow-growing enough to be sound when they have come to full stature.