All in the Day's Work — Chapter 18: Gambling with Security, Part 2

My active interest in the industrial life of the country brought me unexpected adventures.

The most instructive as well as upsetting was serving on a couple of those Government conferences which twentieth century Presidents have used so freely in their attempts to solve difficult national problems.

An Industrial Conference called by President Wilson for the fall of 1919 was the first of these.

Mr. Wilson felt clearly at the end of the War that our immediate important domestic problem was to establish some common ground of agreement and action in the conduct of industry.

What he wanted evidently was a covenant by which employer and employee could work out their common problems as cooperators, not as enemies.

There was need of action, as any one who remembers those days will agree.

The whole labor world was in an uproar, and one of the periodical efforts to organize the steel industry was under way.

Mr. Gompers, the head of the American Federation, sponsoring the strike, had had little or no sympathy with a contest at the moment but had been pushed into it by the adroitness of the radical elements boring from within throughout the War.

“These disturbances must not go on.

It should be possible to make plans for a peaceful solution,” Mr. Wilson said.

And so a Conference was called.

In spite of my refusal to serve on his Tariff Commission, President Wilson had evidently not given me up.

As a matter of fact our acquaintance and mutual confidence had grown during the War.

He now named me as one of four women representatives, the others being Lillian Wald, head of the Nurses’ Settlement in New York City, Gertrude Barnum, assistant director of the investigation service of the United States Department of Labor, and Sara Conboy of the textile workers’ union.

The Conference was an impressive and exciting body of some fifty persons divided into three groups representing the public, labor, the employers.

I, of course, sat in the first group, where I found as my colleagues a bewildering assortment of men from various ranks of life.

There were Dr. Charles Eliot, Charles Edward Russell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr. , Judge Gary, John Spargo, Bernard Baruch, Thomas L. Chadbourne, Jr. , and a score or more less known to the public, though not necessarily less influential.

At the head of the labor group was Samuel Gompers.

Among his colleagues were some of the most experienced labor leaders in the country.

The members of the employer group were chosen from among men who had been particularly helpful in directing their industries during the War.

There were many interesting characters on the body.

Two that I particularly enjoyed were Henry Endicott, who with the Johnsons had established the famous shoe towns near Binghamton, New York, and a delightful pungent character from Georgia—Fuller E. Callaway—who in twenty years had built up from scratch mills and a village with homes and schools—everything to give life and a chance to hard-working mill people.

Mr. Callaway’s story of what he had done in Georgia was one of the very few joyous contributions to a gathering doomed to be a dismal failure.

A body could have scarcely had a heartier welcome from the public than we did.

People seemed to feel we should find a way to end the fighting;

that was what we were there for, Secretary of Labor Wilson told us in his keynote speech.

If we could produce a document which would secure the rights of all those concerned in an industry, it would find a place in the hearts of men like the Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States and the Emancipation Proclamation.

He brought us all to our feet—all save a few who were too interested in political strategy to entertain a high purpose.

We were there to plan for the future of industry.

But almost at once we discovered that it was not peace or the future of industry that was in Mr. Gompers’ mind.

Also, we discovered that the master politician of the body was Mr. Gompers.

We were hardly organized before he called upon us to appoint a committee to report on the steel strike.

Dr. Charles Eliot, outraged, rose in all his very genuine majesty and reminded the body that we were not there to attend to the troubles of the present but to plan that such troubles might be avoided in the future.

But the steel strike was on the table, and we left it there when we disbanded, a menace and an irritation.

It was not Mr. Gompers’ resolution, however, which ruined the Conference.

It was the inability of the representatives of labor and employers to agree on a definition for collective bargaining.

The Conference as a whole contended that such a definition must be a leading plank in the platform we were there to make, but there were to be many other planks.

Committees were at once formed to frame them.

Almost every member of the Conference, too, had some particular resolution that he wanted to incorporate.

I know I did.

But most of us never found an opportunity to present our notions.

Collective bargaining and what it meant were always getting in our way.

The employer group and a considerable number of the public group believed that the definition which the labor group offered meant a closed shop.

Judge Gary openly charged this.

But labor was quite as strong in its suspicion that the definition which came from the employer group encouraged company unions, at that moment flourishing in numbers that alarmed them.

Suspicion governed both groups.

This went on for two weeks; then Secretary Lane, the acting chairman of the Conference, appealed to a very sick President, and from his bed Woodrow Wilson begged us not to allow division on one point to destroy our opportunity: At a time when the nations of the world are endeavoring to find a way of avoiding international war [he wrote], are we to confess that there is no method to be found for carrying on industry except in the spirit and with the very method of war?

Must suspicion and hatred and force rule us in civil life?

Are our industrial leaders and our industrial workers to live together without faith in each other, constantly struggling for advantage over each other, doing naught but what is compelled?

My friends, this would be an intolerable outlook, a prospect unworthy of the large things done by this people in the mastering of this continent; indeed, it would be an invitation to national disaster.

From such a possibility my mind turns away, for my confidence is abiding that in this land we have learned how to accept the general judgment upon matters that affect the public weal.

And this is the very heart and soul of democracy.

But it was too late.

The labor body walked out, except a few railroad men, wise and experienced in negotiations.

A group of employers followed them.

It was defeat.

There was nothing for the President to do but disband the Conference.

He did ask, however, that the public group of some twenty-five carry on.

Now this group included a number of extraordinarily able men.

From them had come some of the wisest and broadest suggestions that had been placed before the Conference.

They could have presented an impressive program, but they had been outmaneuvered.

They lost heart; they refused to go on.

The only remarks I made at that Conference, bewildered as I had been by the political maneuvering, were when I saw the public group prepared for the cowardly business of denying the President’s request.

“Let us stick to it, do our best, make some report,” I pleaded.

But I do not think anybody heard me.

I had an impression as I talked that most of them were calculating when they could get a train to New York.

My next adventure in Government service came two years later as a member of President Harding’s Unemployment Conference.

The country had been caught in the first great postwar depression, and nobody was ready for it.

Nobody knew, indeed, how widespread the unemployment was.

Mr. Harding called a conference to deal with the problem without attempting to find out.

The result was that on one hand you had an opposition belittling the numbers, on the other hand you had the responsible sponsors of the Conference probably exaggerating them.

Nobody knew.

And how easy it would have been to find out, by the same method the country had used in the War when, by a cooperative effort, the number of draftable men was counted in twenty-four hours at a limited expense!

This was an impressive Conference because of the make-up, and it was a mighty well conducted Conference: the chairman, Secretary of Commerce Hoover, kept it in hand from the start—and this in spite of the fact that there were all the elements of conflict found in the Industrial Conference and some extra, for here we had rivalry between the labor groups themselves, particularly that thorny problem of trade jurisdiction.

But Mr. Hoover was enormously skillful, and we came out with a program which, if it had been carried out with the machinery which the Conference devised, would have brought the country to 1929 in a very different state of preparedness.

After our dismissal I put together in a lecture what I conceived to be the practical conclusion of the Conference.

As my text I used one of the first principles laid down, “The time to act is before a crisis becomes inevitable.

” This text was an official and authoritative recognition of the unpalatable fact that business always moves in cycles—that a boom will be followed by a slump, that common sense demands preparedness.

How prepare?

The Federal Government, state, county, community down to the smallest, was to have in reserve plans and money for work it wanted done that was not absolutely essential at the moment.

When a slump started, this reserve was to be called out.

Private industry was by no means let off.

In good times it was to lay up a surplus with which to keep plants and laboratory alive and ready for action as soon as there was a return of orders.

The employee was to be protected by employment insurance.

The individual householder was to keep back certain needed repairs and improvements for the day of need.

That is, everybody was to be ready with his life preserver.

For two years I talked with the conviction of one who has a scheme he believes sound, and I was listened to with more or less enthusiasm, until it was obvious the slump was passing.

It was a bad dream well over—good times had come.

Why lay plans for the future?

By 1926 there were no longer audiences to listen to a talk on preparing for unemployment.

Apparently everybody, even President Hoover, who had been the all-efficient chairman of the Conference, forgot all about the program.

On the whole my little excursions into public service were discouraging and disillusioning; but they did convince me that I was right when I gave as one of my reasons for not going on to President Wilson’s Tariff Commission the fact that I was not fitted for the kind of work a commission or conference requires.

I was an observer, a reporter.

What interested me was watching my fellow members in action: the silent wariness of Secretary Hoover; the amused and slightly contemptuous smile of Charlie Schwab when he heard a woman had been put on the coal committee; the unwillingness of representatives of rival mining unions to do anything to relieve the immediate suffering of West Virginia miners, sufferings so useful in their campaigns; the stubborn look on the faces of those who fought over jurisdiction in an effort to reach an adjustment which would permit hungry men to take up work waiting for them; the quick political lineup; the clever political plays; the gradual fade-out of the objective, its replacement by party ambitions.

All together it was a revealing study of the reason there is so little steady progress in the world.

These failures joined to the refusal to have anything to do with the League of Nations put an end to my hope that the War had taught us much of anything.

We were not ready for the sacrifices necessary for peace, nor had we grasped the natural methods by which things grow.

We believed we could talk, petition, legislate, vote ourselves into peace and prosperity.

We had not learned that toil and self-control are three-fourths of any achievement, and that toil and self-control begin with the individual.

I went on with my talking in these years with a troubled mind.

Continue this way, and we would destroy democracy.

We had allowed, often encouraged, groups of self-interested individuals to have their way.

That meant transformations in government machinery, new types of leaders, a multiplication of the children of privilege we had always so feared, the substitution of humanitarianism for ethics, sympathy for justice.

I was discouraged, but I never lost faith in our scheme of things.

I

never came to believe that we must change democracy for socialism or communism or a dictatorship.

You do not change human nature by changing the machinery.

Under freedom human nature has the best chances for growth, for correcting its weaknesses and failures, for developing its capacities.

It is on these improvements in men that the future welfare of the world depends.

So I believed, and so I argued as I went about, though sometimes, I confess, with a spirit so low that my tongue was in my cheek.

Such was my growing disillusionment when in 1926 I was asked to go to Italy to report on the Fascist State of Benito Mussolini, now four years in power, a scandal to the democracies at which he openly jeered, but an even greater one to the Socialists and Communists who once had thought him on the way to being the strongest radical leader in Europe.

I knew little of what had gone on in Italy after the end of the War.

I

knew the parliamentary system had broken down; I knew there had been two years of guerrilla warfare after the Peace Conference, a period in which it was nip and tuck whether the next ruler of Italy would be Communist or Fascist.

The Fascists under their leader Mussolini had won out.

I had been amazed, and had never ceased to be amazed, that the dramatic march on Rome which ended in changing a parliamentary form of government into a dictatorship had been carried out without bloodshed.

An astonished world had seen tens of thousands of unorganized and in part unarmed men march from every point in Italy to Rome, call for Mussolini, get him by order of the King and then march home again—not a brick thrown, not a head broken.

It was the most amazing transfer of government I had known of.

But I had never given much attention to what had followed.

I had never asked myself if it was inevitable that a dictator should arise in Italy.

I had never asked who was this man Mussolini or what was this corporate state which was emerging.

Uneasy as I was over the way things were going in the United States, I vaguely felt when I was asked to go look all this up that possibly there were lessons there.

Possibly I might learn something from Italy’s experience about the process by which manacles are put on free government.

However, the real reason I went to Italy was because I was offered so large a sum that I thought I could not afford to refuse.

My friends did their best to discourage my going.

Down in Washington a worried undersecretary who gave me my passport and letters of introduction told me pessimistically that I probably should be arrested.

“But why?

” I asked.

“Well, that is what is happening now to all our Americans.

They drink too much, talk too much.

The chief reason, as far as we can make out, is that they have to arrest them because they are attacking the government.

We do the same thing here now and then, you know.

” In Paris my best friends, among them Mr. Jaccaci, so much of an Italian that he talked the dialects of several provinces, told me with all seriousness that I should be searched.

I must not carry letters to members of the opposition, nor books hostile to Mussolini.

Now I was armed with things of that sort, collected in Washington, New York, and Paris.

I did not propose to give them up without a struggle.

I was told I should find no newspapers excepting those sympathetic to the regime—a serious handicap, as I always count largely on newspapers.

I must always use the Fascist salute.

I took this so seriously that I practiced it in my Paris bedroom.

I must not speak French.

I was counting on that, as I speak no Italian.

That is, I started off to Italy with a large collection of “don’ts” coming from people I considered informed.

If I had not had a natural dislike of giving up an undertaking I never would have carried out my assignment.

However, at the end of the first day in Rome, a very exciting day, I awakened to the fact that nobody had searched my bags for incriminating documents, that I had talked French all day, and that I hadn’t noticed anybody using the Fascist salute, and, most important, that I had found at every newspaper kiosk all the French and English papers side by side with the Italian.

It gave me confidence.

As a matter of fact in the four to five months that I was in Italy I did practically what I had planned to do, and nobody paid any attention to me.

My mail was never interfered with, so far as I know.

That is, none of the dire prophecies of interference to which I had listened at the start came true.

I do not mean to say it was always easy to get to the people with whom I wanted to talk; more than once, when I succeeded, I found the person fearful of quotation.

I do not mean to say that I found no revolts.

Down in Palermo, in corners of Milan and Florence and Turin, as a matter of fact almost everywhere, I ran across bitter critics of the new regime such as I hear every day in this year of 1938 of the President of the United States; but on the whole even good parliamentarians were accepting Mussolini.

“He has saved the country,” men told me.

“We don’t accept his methods, we don’t believe in dictatorship; but it is better than anarchy.

” Making my headquarters at Rome, I went over the country fairly well, particularly the industrial sections.

I visited Turin with its hydroelectric developments, its great Fiat factory, its artificial silk, all plants of the first order.

I spent some days in Milan, visited the great Pirelli plant, at the moment making underground cables for Chicago.

I saw what was left of the cooperatives at Bologna.

I climbed into that plucky little independent Republic of San Marino.

Mussolini had been there just before I arrived.

They were all for him.

He worked and made people work.

That is what had made San Marino.

I went south into Calabria, over into Sicily—always looking for the effects of the new regime on the life of the people.

There was no doubt sensible things were going on—redemption of land, extension of water power, amazing efforts at wheat production; and the people were accepting the regime with understanding, realists that they were.

The first thing that springs to my mind now when I recall those months in Italy is a long procession of men, women, and children bent in labor.

They harvested fields of rice, wheat, alfalfa, laying grain in perfect swaths; they sat on the ground, stripping and sorting tobacco leaves.

Tiny girls, old women crowded narrow rooms, embroidering with sure fingers lovely designs on linen, fine and coarse; they cooked their meals before all the world in the narrow streets of Naples; they carried home at sunset from the terraces or slopes of mountains great baskets of grapes, olives, lemons—young women straight and firm, their burdens poised surely on their heads, old women bent under the weight on their backs.

They drove donkeys so laden that only a nodding head, a switching tail were visible; they filled the roads with their gay two-wheeled carts, tended sheep, ran machines, sat in markets, spun, weaved, molded, built—a world of work.

Mingled with these pictures of labor were equally vagrant ones of these same men and women at play: holiday and Sunday crowds filling the streets, the roads, the cinemas, the dancing pavilions, the squares of little towns that traced their history back clearly more than two thousand years.

In those squares, gay with flags and streamers and light and booths, in the evenings, throngs held their breath as to the notes of soft music the lithe figures of the ropewalkers passed high overhead with slow and rhythmic steps.

It was hard to realize when I looked on them that six years earlier these same people had been as badly out of step as they were perfectly in step at the present moment, that instead of rhythmic labor, there was a clash of disorder and revolt.

Men and women refused not only to work themselves, but to let other people work.

Grain died in the fields, threshing machines were destroyed, factories were seized, shops were looted, railway trains ran as suited the crew.

Sunday was a day, not of rest, amusement, prayer, but of war; fêtes were dangerous, liable to be broken up by raids.

Instead of the steady balance, orderly action, so conspicuous today, were the disorganization, anger, violence of a people unprotected in its normal life: a people become the prey of a dozen clashing political parties and not knowing where to look for a Moses to lead it out of their Egypt.

How could it be, one asked, that in so brief a time a people should drop its clubs and pick up its tools?

There was only one answer: Mussolini.

Already he was a legend, a name everywhere to conjure with.

I used it myself after I had talked with him, on scared gentlemen to whom I had letters of introduction, and who feared quotation: “But Mussolini saw me—talked with me.

” Nothing too much trouble after that.

But what kind of man was this dictator?

“You must go and see Mussolini,” our able and friendly Ambassador Henry P.

Fletcher told me one morning while I was working on the Embassy’s voluminous records of what had gone on in Italy since the end of the War.

I balked.

“I am not ready with the questions I want to ask him.

” “Oh,” said Mr. Fletcher, “just go down and have a chat with him.

” With my notion of Mussolini gathered largely from English and American as well as hostile Italian sources, the word seemed utterly incongruous.

Could one chat with this bombastic and terrifying individual who never listened, told you what to think, to say?

Impossible.

But of course I went.

The most exciting and interesting hour and a half I spent in Italy was in an anteroom watching twoscore or more persons who were waiting to be received, watching them go in so scared, come out exultant, go in inflated, come out collapsed.

There was no one of them but was anxious, even the Admiral of the Fleet then at Ostia.

He walked nervously about while he was waiting, adjusting his uniform, and when his turn came strode in as if marching in a parade.

Nothing I saw in Italy, as I have said, was more interesting to me.

Though I must confess that all the time there was an undercurrent of nervousness.

What I was afraid of was that my French would go to pieces, provided he gave me a chance to speak at all—of which I had a doubt.

What if I should forget and say “vous” instead of “votre excellence”?

Should I be shot at sunrise?

It was all so different from what I had anticipated.

I must have misread and misheard the reports of interviews to have had such an unpleasant impression of what was waiting me.

As I crossed the long room towards the desk Mussolini came around to meet me, asked me to take one of the two big chairs which stood in front of his desk—and, as he seated me, was apologizing, actually apologizing, in excellent English for keeping me waiting.

As he did it I saw that he had a most extraordinary smile, and that when he smiled he had a dimple.

Nothing could have been more natural, simple, and courteous than the way he put me at my ease.

His French, in which he spoke after his first greeting, was fluent, excellent.

I found myself not at all afraid to talk, eager to do so.

If he had not been as eager, I think I should have done all the talking, for luckily at once we hit on a common interest—better housing.

His smiling face became excited and stern.

He pounded the table.

“Men and women must have better places in which to live.

You cannot expect them to be good citizens in the hovels they are living in, in parts of Italy.

” He went on to talk with appreciation and understanding of the various building undertakings already well advanced, some of which I had seen in different parts of the country.

He talked at length of the effect on women of crowded, cheerless homes.

“A reason for their drinking too much wine sometimes,” he mused.

He was particularly interested in what prohibition was doing to working people in the United States.

“I am dry,” he said, “but I would not have Italy dry [_sec_].

” And he amused me by quickly changing _sec_ to _seche_.

“We need wine to keep alive the social sense in our hard-working people.

” Altogether it was an illuminating half-hour, and when Mussolini accompanied me to the door and kissed my hand in the gallant Italian fashion I understood for the first time an unexpected phase of the man which makes him such a power in Italy.

He might be—was, I believed—a fearful despot, but he had a dimple.

I left Italy, my head alive with speculations as to the future of the man.

There was a chance, and it seemed to me a very good one, that he would be assassinated.

Three dramatic attempts were made on his life while I was there, attempts known to the public.

There may have been others, the authorities kept quiet.

As I was sailing there came a rash attack on him at Bologna, the assassin being torn to pieces, so it was said, by an enraged crowd.

For months after my return I watched my morning paper for the headline, “Mussolini Assassinated.

” Of course there was a chance—so far as I could see, it was what Mussolini himself believed he could realize—to bring Italy to an even keel economically, by thrift, hard work, development of resources and by a system of legitimate colonization in the parts of the earth where he could obtain land, by treaty or by purchase.

And there was a third possibility to one at all familiar with the course of dictators in the world, particularly with the one with whom you instinctively compare Mussolini—Napoleon Bonaparte—that the day would come when he would overreach himself in a too magnificent attempt, an attempt beyond the forces of his country and so of himself, and he would finally go down as Napoleon went down.

Are Ethiopia and the alliance with Franco and the rebels of Spain to be to Mussolini what Spain and Russia were to Napoleon?

I was glad to breathe the air of the United States.

It was still free, whatever our follies.

There was at that moment no dictator in sight—no talk of one.

But it was not Mussolini or the Corporate State which mattered to us: it was what was back of them.

Why had parliamentary government broken down in Italy, the Italy of Garibaldi, of Cavour, Victor Emmanuel?

Why had a dictator been able to replace it with a new form of government?

Could this happen in the government of Washington and Lincoln?

Those were the questions of importance to Americans.

There was where there was something to learn.