U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [362]
was as good as ever at the end of the day.
He was a crank about shovels, every job had to
have a shovel of the right weight and size for that job alone; every job had to have a man of the right weight and size for that job alone; but when he began to pay his men in proportion to the increased efficiency of their work,
-23-the owners who were a lot of greedy smal eyed
Dutchmen began to raise Hail Columbia; when Schwab
bought Bethlehem Steel in 1901
Fred Taylor
inventor of efficiency
who had doubled the production of the stamping-mil by speeding up the main lines of shafting from ninetysix to twohundred and twentyfive revolutions a minute was unceremoniously fired.
After that Fred Taylor always said he couldn't af-ford to work for money. He took to playing golf (using golfclubs of his
own design), doping out methods for transplanting
huge boxtrees into the garden of his home.
At Boxly in Germantown he kept open house for
engineers, factorymanagers, industrialists;
he wrote papers,
lectured in col eges,
appeared before a congressional committee,
everywhere preached the virtues of scientific man-agement and the Barth slide rule, the cutting down of waste and idleness, the substitution for skil ed mechanics of the plain handyman (like Schmidt the pigiron
handler) who'd move as he was told
and work by the piece:
production;
more steel rails more bicycles more spools of
thread more armorplate for battleships more bedpans more barbedwire more needles more lightningrods
more bal bearings more dol arbil s;
(the old Quaker families of Germantown were
growing rich, the Pennsylvania mil ionaires were breed-ing bil ionaires out of iron and coal)
-24-production would make every firstclass American rich who was wil ing to work at piecework and not
drink or raise' Cain or think or stand mooning at his lathe.
Thrifty Schmidt the pigiron handler can invest his
money and get to be an owner like Schwab and the rest of the greedy smal eyed Dutchmen and cultivate a
taste for Bach and have hundred gyearold boxtrees in his garden at Bethlehem or Germantown or Chestnut Hil , and lay down the rules of conduct;
the American plan.
But Fred Taylor never saw the working of the
American plan;
in 1915 he went to the hospital in Philadelphia
suffering from a breakdown.
Pneumonia developed; the nightnurse heard him
winding his watch;
on the morning of his fiftyninth birthday, when
the nurse went into his room to look at him at four-thirty, he was dead with his watch in his hand.
NEWSREEL XLVI
these are the men for whom the rabid lawless, anarchistic element of society in this country has been laboring ever since sentence was imposed, and of late they have been augmented by many good lawabiding citizens who have been misled by the subtle arguments of those propagandists
The times are hard and the wages low
Leave her Johnny leave her
The bread is hard and the beef is salt
It's time for us to leave her
-25-BANKERS HAIL ERA OF EXPANSION
PROSPERITY FOR ALL SEEN ASSURED
Find German Love of Caviar a Danger to Stable Money EX-SERVICE MEN DEMAND
JOBS
No one knows
No one cares if I'm weary
Oh how soon they forgot Chhteau-Thierry
WE FEEL VERY FRIENDLY TOWARDS THE
TYPEWRITER USERS OF NEW YORK CITY
JOBLESS RIOT AT AGENCY
Ships in de oceans
Rocks in de sea
Blond-headed woman
Made a fool outa me
THE CAMERA EYE (43)
throat tightens when the redstacked steamer churn-ing the faintlyheaving slatecolored swel swerves shaking in a long greenmarbled curve past the red lightship spine stiffens with the remembered chil of the off-shore Atlantic and the jag of framehouses in the west above the
invisible land and spiderweb rol ercoasters and the chew-inggum towers of Coney and the freighters with their stacks way aft and the blur beyond Sandy Hook and the smel of saltmarshes warmclammysweet
-26-remembered bays silvery inlets barred with trestles the put put before day of a gasolineboat way up the creek
raked masts of bugeyes against straight tal pines on the shel white beach the limeycold reek of an oysterboat in winter