Chapter 20
The Warehouse Era
2With the arrival in America of traders and feudal capitalists, the erudition of the literate colonies, though eventually to prove prime emancipator, became a matter, for the nonce, of important exploitation. A battle of wits developed between the shrewd, materialistically-inclined newcomers and the freedom-loving pioneers. The outpost centrals, Boston and Philadelphia, as well as the primary trading central, New York, provided the exploitation schemers with many academically exploitable persons, who were won over by a variety of temptations.
3 Boston and Philadelphia, centers of advanced education, began to develop a vast crop of ‘‘lawyers’’ out of second and third generation colonists, who used their learning to espouse the cause of the intrinsically wealthier and pleasantly patronizing Old-World bully, which ‘‘cause’’ was the acquisition of control over the industrial productivity of the new land. The academies and universities became paradoxically endowment-won tools for mental attitude conditioning in a manner suitable to materialistic exploitation. Matter had successfully counter-attacked to momentary re-dominance over mind.
4 Innumerable legal contrivances were effected to divert the profitable fruit of the colonies’ production into a channel of revenue, coursing back to the Old World. England—ruler of the maritime trade, to whom the Dutch, with their moneys-centralization, were inherently and expeditiously subservient—became the chief revenue extractor. Before long ‘‘she’’ set up the colonies as ‘‘sovereign’’ estates which ‘‘she’’ controlled by the titular deeding of properties through the spaded ‘‘Crown’’—that Crown in the name of which original discoveries upon the continent had been piratically claimed with sanctimonious cross-planting in, paradoxically, ‘‘Gods own country.’’
5 The Pilgrims had settled in common weal, heedless, in their fervor, of the piratical claims of vast lands, because they intuitively felt themselves to be unaffected, from a practical viewpoint, by such an untenable assumption, i.e., that the land belonged to the king and must be especially deeded to them as accessory-after-the-fact of settlement. A bit nostalgically, however, they ‘‘took it’’ gravely as God-given red tape, and through the same sentiment renamed their new communes after the town which they voluntarily abandoned. So transcendental to material power was the pure Pilgrim element that it was ‘‘above’’ physically resisting bullying tactics. This spiritual aloofness, coupled with realistic and vastly novel emergencies and the swelling of the ranks by the fearful, sheepish ‘‘witchcraft’’ sabotaging and propagandizing slaves of Old-World control, caused the colonies popularly to forget the European ‘‘depression.’’ Moreover, the fact that the colonists’ children had not experienced the European chaos allowed of the latter’s becoming materially intrigued by the glamours of the sovereign estate.
6 Eventually, however, the offspring of the cross-bred longing colonizers became surfeited with the in-valid ‘‘sovereign’’ claim. Annoyed and taxed beyond endurance, they burst the bonds of the Old World. The American Revolution was the revolt of a new mind-over-matter, longing-dominated scientific element, not only from England but from the WHOLE of Europe—and more understandingly from that streamlined interim chaos of the Greek teleologists.
7 Fate played a high part in the success of the revolt. Although our academic historians have romantically featured Lafayette as the in-the-cause-of-freedom representative of France, coming to the aid of the Colonists inspired by their beauteous necessity, the truth is that French participation was precipitated by the racketeer’s-necessity of France to protect her ‘‘sovereign’’ claims in hinterland America. Two sovereign expeditions, paid for or manipulated by France’s feudal capitalists, had penetrated into the North American continent both to the north and to the south of the English and Dutch colonies. These two expeditions had staked out for France all of the central continent between their north and south lines of exploration, viz., the entire valleys of the Mississippi River and the majority of the St. Lawrence.
8 Spain, the first nation that had asserted sovereign claims in America, was entrenched in the land south and west of the French dominion, that is, in the West Indies, Mexico, and Central and South America, with penetrations from Central America northward along the west coast of North America. Spain, therefore, warily weighed the question of forcibly protecting her sovereign claims and decided that they were well insulated from the British by the French. So, through statecraft intrigue, she abetted the French in their aid to the rebellious British colonists. ‘‘She’’ (Spain) thus avoided direct participation lest she be involved in open combat with a traditional enemy which would have jeopardized her domain in the event of failure of the revolution.
9 The colonials emerged triumphant over England. Despite the victory, however, and despite their continued success in dealing with Europe through the statecraft of rebellious, erudite Boston and Philadelphia ‘‘lawyer’’ delegates to Europe (playing European interests one against the other so effectively as to put over, for instance, the ‘‘Louisiana purchase’’ from France in lieu of pressing the colonies’ claims in French-English Canada, which were quite potential of ‘‘proof’’), they were naively unable to remain aloof from the insistently infiltrating trade and social traditions. It was impossible not to be influenced by the back-stroking of resident servants of feudal capitalists who disclaimed any ‘‘realistic’’ sympathy for the ‘‘mother’’ country. Moreover, it seemed expedient to adhere to the money habits of trade as imported by the Dutch. Hence the American colonists, having started with a no-property idea, became highly propertyized.
10 An extensive coterie of Boston and Philadelphia lawyers found such profit in protecting materialistic habits that, ignoring the spirit of freedom that had utterly permeated the Declaration of Independence, they schemingly saw to it that the Constitution, adopted subsequent to the revolt, was well pitted with loopholes for exploitation use. The ‘‘unearned-profit’’ disease, as with syphilis, has taken years of patient researching on the part of a few, and long-suffering and blatant balking on the part of many to become potential of extermination.
11 Fortunately, one democracy-saving factor survived the ‘‘Old World’’ contagion continuity. Primary education remained socialized.
12 In consideration of the then extreme isolation of trading centers and the poor means of transportation and communication, it became an easy matter for the capitalist to exploit the new industrialism, now so potentially productive of social weal in America. The exploiter-virus needed only to make two moves: first, to finance the exploration and discovery of elemental sources of such raws as were vital to the manufacturing processes, and, secondly, to employ lawyers to arrange transportation and communication franchises and to seize the monopoly of transportation, both to and from sources, and between centrals of increasingly necessary intercoursing.
13 The ‘‘bought for a shilling’’ sources of raws were non-revenue producing, however, without some primary conversion by refining and fabrication into forms that would lend themselves to economical transportation to manufacturing centers and into convenient units of trade classification and small manufacture purchase.
14 So the capitalists established refineries and mills at sources as well as great warehouses in the trading centers to which they brought their converted-at-the-source raws. These warehouses were akin to concentrated ‘‘mines’’ located conveniently near both the small manufacturer and the merchants, and the masses of population essential both for operation by the manufacturers, and as an initial consumer-outlet for the end ‘‘goods’’ so produced.
15 Hence the period between the Revolution and the World War, although characterized by an ever-improving mechanization of transportation facilities, as a result of greed for profitable revenue from the monopolies, may be called, popularly, the WAREHOUSE ERA. An analogy is not untenable between the practices and attitude toward human beings involved in this appellation and substitution ‘‘ho’’ for the letter ‘‘a’’ in the period’s name.
16 Despite the journeys of trade managers and political servants of capital, scheduled travel was not popular in the warehouse era. The migratory, pioneering movements consigned themselves to ‘‘covered wagons,’’ and did not patronize the commercialized routes established under transportation franchises.
17 The warehouse era was provocative of the establishment of ever greater and greater CITIES, having five primary elements: CENTRALIZED CONSUMER PRODUCT MANUFACTURE, WAREHOUSING, CLERKING AND TRADE, EXPORT AND IMPORT, and the INTERSPERSED DWELLER, WORKER, BUYER OF THE CENTRALS. The last mentioned composite element was of least calculation consequence to the capitalists except as an animate machine to run teleologically the inanimate machine extensions; to serve as a machine of clerking, and as a machine of consumption of product.
18 These cities, through economic profit-efficiency, evolved within their bounds concentrated marts or exchanges, all embodying the foregoing five primary elemental constituents. But an export and import city’s strategic sub-divisions are disposed by geographical considerations of warehousing relative thereto, calling for a subsegregation of the whole phenomenon ‘‘city’’ into specializing marts, such as those of produce, leather, spices and metal.
19 Logically, the manufactories requiring water power decentralized themselves somewhat from the city toward available rivers, but they did not detach themselves further than a days horse-haul from the warehouse centrals.
20 In the warehouse era, no matter how ingenious young and erudite minds may have been in the invention of processes and mechanical tools, the ultimate fabrication of the inventions was necessarily limited to the warehoused materials. Most typical of this era, in which metals were becoming of increasing consequence, was the familiar sight of rust everywhere. Capitalists interested in tonnage-ofmetal-turned-out were not concerned with making better end products for ultimate consumers. Conversely they served and profited by the tenet that: the faster products rust and deteriorate, the greater the revenue.
21 RUST was characteristic of the inferiority of goods which it behooved the capitalist to produce in his ever more efficient, behindthe-scenes, industrial plant. The capitalists’ gleamingly equipped powerhouses stood in marked contrast to the rusting pots and pans, the manufacture of which he was instrumenting.
22 Equally great was the contrast between the business buildings designed for the efficient clerking and accounting of trade and the shabby dwellings of the bifunctional, biexploitable worker-consumer, as the warehouse era matured.
23 The fact that the ‘‘skyscrapers’’ were primarily the ‘‘show windows’’ of multitudinous rackets, partially accounted for their lavish pretentiousness of design. Thus, late in the warehouse era, the gigantic Equitable Building, the largest business structure in the world at the end of the World War, as well as many lesser structures, provided the strangest of paradoxes. The Equitable was furnished with the finest of plumbing and fixtures, because it had been found conducive to highest efficiency to have the clerks housed, while working, in the most orderly, resistance-eliminating and harmony-breeding surroundings. Thus housed during hired hours they could put their best endeavor into their ‘‘accounting,’’ et cetera, without the loss of a single dollar. A large percentage of stenographers at that time commuted from hovels with ‘‘outside’’ wooden privies ‘‘or equal’’ to heavens of sanitary luxury. Little wonder that the clerks of those days enjoyed giving ‘‘company’’ parties in their offices!
24 Before the introduction of first-class plumbing into the ‘‘house of business’’ one could readily distinguish by accoutrement and deportment between the feudalist’s traveled debutante daughter and Miss Murphy, the local ‘‘stenog.’’ However, the business-plumbingheaven, with its attractive rest rooms, precipitated first a rapid evolution in the standards of dress of the clerical working girl and subsequently all working girls. She accelerated her transition in accoutrement to a compatibility with standards of plumbing experience. Within a few years, this transition, abetted by movies and ‘‘style’’ publications, made it impossible, superificially, to distinguish the ‘‘deb’’ from the typist.
25 As a business scheme the warehouse era may be ‘‘boiled down’’ to a one-way flow diagram in which the exploiter grabbed off sources with whatever minimum subterfuge was necessary as well as control of the transportation means of the down-hill flow to the dump heap. The faster the element of the original source of exploitation reached the dump heap the better. Ergo, the rule of thumb was the perpetuation of the lowest possible degree of efficiency in products and consumer life—‘‘thumbs down’’ to improvement—orthodox bankers always say ‘‘No.’’ Anyone who entered into a ringside executive’s seat in such a business economy had perforce, as a ‘‘realist,’’ to subscribe to this rule.
26 Since, evolutionarily, man is ever more intelligent, even the modicum of rationalization obtaining in the ‘‘inner circle’’ evoked the conscious recognition by its members of the profits inherent in the ‘‘principle of inefficiency.’’ What they lacked was sufficient intellect to comprehend the inherently greater debits. These did not show on the books in good times and were otherwise (usually politically) accounted in bad times. Some boldly laughed it off; others, intuitively awake, sought sanctimoniously to salve their consciences through sympathetic benevolences—church charities, et cetera.
27 Once more it is to be pointed out that despite so ruthless an attitude, the exploiters inevitably established high efficiency in the behind-the-scenes essential productive mechanisms while pursuing the superficial rottenness. These mechanisms had the potentiality of becoming, granted a random element emergence, directly available to the industrial communal society growing up in the North American continent. This rising society with its extending industrial mechanism despite exploitation camouflage actually was the guinea pig of the ‘‘New World’’ laboratory.
28 The exploiters had one great vulnerability. This was their dumpheap-bound scheme itself. The progression of cupidity and waste had ultimately to amplify into an attempt to engulf the whole world in accelerated destruction. Wherefore:—the World War. The random element involved was socialized education in the United States. Those in command of the business of public economy were able to prevent the high initiative of the cross-bred longing type from articulating its cultivated knowledge in end-product efficiency or in efficiencies of personal environment. They were not smart enough, however, to stop popular education itself. Not smart enough to stop the abstract and all-important mind-over-matter progression. Not being mind-over-matterist-minded, they failed to appraise this ‘‘theoretical’’ progression as so powerful as ultimately first to dominate and then to eliminate their ‘‘materialism.’’