The year is 1893. We are touring the "largest vehicle manufacturing plant
of its kind in the world", The Parry Manufacturing Company of
Indianapolis. The factory builds a full line of buggies: surreys,
phaetons, piano-box buggies, spring wagons, etc.
An inspection of the premises on foot is a good day's work in itself. Such
is the multiplicity of departments that the mind becomes somewhat
confused, and fails to retain more than an impression that it is something
huge.
You've never seen so many wheels and gears under one roof as is contained
in the gear and wheel department. The wheels are stored so thick and in
such quantity, that it would seem as if they were moving about in a
continual stream, propelled by boys. To stand at a given point and observe
the movement is to get dizzy. In the gear room, the axle arms of thousands
sticking up in close array gives one the idea of regiments of soldiers
standing at "shoulder arms" with the barrels of the guns alone visible.
It's a great sight!
The trim-shop is perhaps the largest on earth, but it is not so impressive
as the other departments. In one building where stuff is gotten out for
bodies and gears you would suppose you were in a wood-working factory, so
numerous are the machines.
The system of work seems to be about perfection. In all the vast place the
work proceeds without friction or confusion. Nothing short of executive
genius could organize such a plant into its present perfection, and it is
to President D. M. Parry that the palm of success must be awarded for
producing this highly organized plant.
. . .
Barring Parry's general office is a wrought iron fence, the entrance
through which is a heavy gate which fastens with a spring lock. Back of
the gate is a big, burly "bouncer." A flight of steps leads to Parry's
office, and at the head of the steps sits a negro with a Winchester rifle
across his knees. One cannot interview Parry without first stating his
business to two persons, and being questioned, scanned and quizzed. When
he ventures about the streets of the city, he carries an automatic
revolver in each coat pocket and is accompanied by a heavily armed
bodyguard.
And when one is face to face with D.M. Parry! He is short and of slight
build. His skin resembles parchment. His face is sphinxlike. He is always
faultlessly dressed. He never utters an unnecessary word, except when he
launches forth in a tirade against labor unions.
. . .
In 1902, Parry assumed the presidency of the National Association of
Manufacturers, which until that time had focused on promoting trade and
reforming tariffs. Under Parry's leadership, the association adopted a
militantly anti-union labor policy. According to a 1903 assessment by Jack
London:
The National Association of Manufacturers, is
stopping short of nothing in what it conceives to
be a life-and-death struggle. Mr. D.M. Parry, who
is the president of the league . . . is leaving no
stone unturned in what he feels to be a desperate
effort to organize his class. He has issued the
call to arms in terms everything but ambiguous:
'THERE IS STILL TIME IN THE UNITED STATES TO HEAD
OFF THE SOCIALISTIC PROGRAMME, WHICH, UNRESTRAINED,
IS SURE TO WRECK OUR COUNTRY.'"
As he says, the work is for 'federating employers
in order that we may meet with a united front all
issues that affect us. We must come to this sooner
or later. . . . The work immediately before the
National Association of Manufacturers is, first,
KEEP THE VICIOUS EIGHT-HOUR BILL OFF THE BOOKS.'
The "vicious eight-hour bill" was legislation pending before the US Senate
that would prohibit contractors supplying materials or equipment to the
federal government from working their employees more than eight hours in
one calendar day. Parry told the 1903 convention of the N.A.M., the bill
might as well be entitled "An Act to Repeal the Bill of Rights
Guaranteeing the Freedom of the Individual." Parry's alarm about the
unions' drive for an eight-hour day echoed an argument attributed to Edwin
A. Pratt that had appeared a year earlier in the Times of London:
It was hoped to "absorb" all the unemployed in course
of time, not by the laudable and much-to-be-desired
means of increasing the volume of trade, and hence,
also, the amount of work to be done, but simply by
obtaining employment for a larger number of persons
on such work as there was already. The motive of this
aspiration, however, was not one of philanthropy pure
and simple. When all the unemployed had been absorbed
the workers would have the employers entirely at
their mercy, and would be able to command such wages
and such terms as they might think fit. The general
adoption of the eight hours system was to bring in a
certain proportion of the unemployed; if there were
still too many left the eight hours system was to be
followed by a six hours system; while if, within the
six, or eight, or any other term of hours, every one
took things easy and did as little work as he
conveniently could, still more openings would be
found for the remaining unemployed, and still better
would be the chances for the Socialist propaganda.
Hyperbole? Not compared to Parry's novel, published in 1906, entitled _The
Scarlet Empire_.
In the novel, John Walker, an impoverished, good-hearted, but fatally
naive young socialist, in despair at the evils of capitalist America,
attempts suicide by throwing himself off the Coney Island Pier into the
midwinter Atlantic. He doesn't drown (even though his pocket is weighted
down with a copy of _The Iniquities of the Capitalist Regime_). Much to
his astonishment and initial delight, he is rescued by an inhabitant of
the "socialist utopia" Atlantis. Using Walker as his point of view, Parry
manufactures a crude *Bildungsroman*: Walker learns, as it were, the true
lesson of socialism and by the end of the novel has made his commitment to
good, old-fashioned American capitalism. We learn that after his escape
from the Atlantean dungeon, Walker will return to the United States,
change his name, and devote his remaining years to the accumulation of a
large industrial fortune.
Throughout the novel, Parry insists on the particular responsibility of
organized labor in creating the social-democratic system he portrays as so
appalling. The million omnipresent inspectors who peer into every cranny
of Atlantean life to enforce the laws of mediocrity are the administrative
and ideological heirs of the union's walking delegates. The principles
that inform the "damnable Democracy" all have their genesis in an
Atlantean labor movement strikingly similar in its agenda to that of the
United States at the turn of the century. A dissident doctor, Walker's
confidant throughout the book, outlines the chronology:
But for the Federation of Labor the Social
Democracy would never have been. It was the
Federation that paved the way. It passed laws
providing that the State should fix wages and hours
of labor. It declared what should constitute a
day's work in all industries, it limited the number
of men who could be permitted to learn the various
trades and occupations . . . "
>From laws to fix wages and hours of labor, the socialist dystopia
progressed irresistibly to a place of relentless and ruthless leveling, of
mediocrity canonized, of joyless, uniform gray.
All men being equal, in Atlantis they are forced to be equal in every
microscopic detail. Money and private property have long since been
abolished, as have any and all appurtenances of status based on skill or
intelligence. Every citizen of Atlantis eats the same number of ounces of
identically prepared fish gruel and seaweed each day. Everybody wears the
same dully colored, crudely stitched clothing and lives in uniformly
miserable hutches.
There is no crime in Atlantis. But there are large numbers of people in
prison, political deviates, widely understood to be insane, and labeled
"atavars". Periodically, at great festivals attended by the entire
population of the country, and for which national holidays are decreed,
the most notorious and intractable of the imprisoned malcontents are
dragged from their cells and grotesquely executed.
The condemned prisoners are marched into a huge amphitheater, which is
crowded with thousands of their bloodthirsty socialist fellow citizens. To
the ear-splitting applause of that mob, the victims are pushed through an
airlock in the base of a large transparent sea wall. Waiting on the other
side, ready to ingest them before they can even drown, lurks a nightmarish
creature with immense eyes, a dozen great tentacles as large around as a
man's body and a cavernous mouth, which contains teeth like those of a
crocodile.
Parry was not a man to stand idly by while America slid inexorably from
the eight-hour day to the dissident devouring dodecapuss. Instead he
launched the National Association of Manufacturers on a ten-year campaign
of lobbying, spying, strike-breaking, influence peddling, black-listing,
propaganda (association members were mobilized to funnel their advertising
dollars to newspapers carrying sympathetic editorial content) and
political slush funding that in 1913 became the subject of congressional
hearings and sensational revelations in the Chicago Tribune and New York
World.
According to "Colonel" Martin Mulhall, a N.A.M. lobbyist who was himself
of dubious character, the association through its agents, successfully
conducted a strike-breaking campaign using spies to corrupt minor labor
leaders and depending upon the cooperation of politicians in both parties.
The N.A.M. conducted a relentless warfare against public officials who
opposed its plans, financed the campaigns of candidates against them, and
made-up a black list of prominent figures in public life and labor
circles.
Commenting on the affair, the American Federation of Labor claimed the
revelations:
revealed to the American people a series of
chapters of deception, corruption, and perfidy that
has never before been equaled in the history of the
United States for scope of operation, audacity of
conception and inhumanity of purpose. The
correspondence of the National Association of
Manufacturers and testimony revealed a treachery
and deception which are hardly conceivable as
existing among men of this generation.
Parry's crusade against the "vicious eight-hour bill" floundered in the
short term. In 1912, President William Howard Taft signed the eight-hour
law. In 1913, the N.A.M. was rocked by revelations about its lobbying
activities. In 1914, Henry Ford adopted the eight-hour day in his
automobile factory (Parry is said to have given Ford his first financial
assistance). Parry himself became seriously ill returning from a tour of
Asia in August of 1914 and died the following May. In 1916, the Adamson
Act introduced the eight-hour day for railroad workers. During the first
world war, the National War Labor Board urged the adoption of the
eight-hour day in many industries.
But, as Marx wrote in the spring of 1852, ". . . all great world-historic
facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. . . the first time as
tragedy, the second time as farce." Parry -- who coincidentally was born
in the spring of 1852 -- left behind an incedible legacy of paranoid
tactics and propaganda. The propaganda hammered repeatedly on a single
theme: the call for an eight-hour day was a socialistic plot by the unions
to cripple American industry. To make it more palatable, though, the claim
was dressed up in pseudo-economic phraseology. In the 1920s and later, the
N.A.M. propaganda insinuated itself into economics textbooks, typically
juxtaposed (without comment) alongside more reputable discussions -- as if
textbook authors were taking pains to insure a "balanced presentation" of
"both sides" of the issue.
Farcically, the Parry-noid view of the eight-hour day -- sans socialist
sea-monster -- has come to be accepted unquestioningly by mainstream
economists. When, in contemporary discussions of shorter working time,
economists refer to a fallacious belief among labor unions that there is
only a "fixed amount of work" they are unwittingly paying homage to the
prodigious propaganda efforts of David Maclean Parry -- titan of industry,
hack novelist, splenetic capitalist class warrior.
(The summary of _The Scarlet Empire_ in the above account was lifted
with minor modifications from Peter Conn's The Divided Mind)
Tom Walker
TimeWork Web
http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/worksite.htm
