Vol 112

No 1

OLITICAL or dynastic revolu-
tions may be accomplished with
clamor and tumult before the
staring eyes of all the world, but
when we come to industry and com-
merce the revolutions that make the
deepest dent seem to make the least
noise. For the last five years Ameri-
can industry has been remaking it-
self, and scarcely anybody outside
the circles directly affected has paid
attention to the upthrust. Yet
it means changes so much greater
than those made by most wars that
hereafter it is likely to be wondered
about as beginning an epoch not only
in our history but in other people's,
even to the other side of the world
and all up and down it.

Already it has gone far enough to
shake faiths once rock-ribbed, age-
venerated, and universally accepted.
Businesslike that has always meant
with us something efficient, capable,
wise, shrewd, prompt, on the job,
careful, and, above all, economical.
Business-that has meant the best of
human skill and foresight. Govern-
ment-that has meant things done
laxly, wastefully, improvidently.

What this nation needed was a busi-
nesslike administration of its affairs.
Since childhood's happy hour have
we said this, chanted it, chimed
it, alone and in chorus, hymned,
hummed, and believed it-an axiom,
a proverb, a self-evident truth! Re-
peating it with sighs, as a boon, alas!
unattainable, yet we found in it, too,
a kind of relish. To an eminently
business people it was gratifying; to
a free people, useful. If other mis-
siles failed we could always throw
this at a government we felt a duty
to decry. Of course we do not have
now to part with so precious a pos-
session if we are resolute to keep it.
Only one flaw appears in it. Ac-
cording to the documented and other
disclosures of this revolution, it
happens not to be true.

The Federal Department of Com-
merce and the Chamber of Commerce
of the United States, being the chief
revolutionists, have united in certain
wide-spread, searching, and unques-
tionable investigations, from which
business-in the mass-emerges con-
victed of bewildering extravagance
and waste, and poor
poor old
government,

I

which we have always regarded as doddering and incompetent, treads the stage in the rôle of teaching business how to be efficient.

Such is the fact, however incredible and unpalatable. But even this result of the new day will seem like a by-product when compared with others, attained or indicated, for these are of a nature to remind one of the introduction of steamdriven machinery and the first days of iron ships.

C'est la guerre-partly; and even partly, still a thing to note with satisfaction, being another good mixed in so much evil. It was the War Industries Board of which Bernard M. Baruch was chairman that started the upheaval. In the days of war stress, there was no time to trade jack-knives; the utmost possible production with the utmost possible celerity was the incessant pressure from an inevitable demand. Munitions, supplies, food-we must have them in great quantities and at once. The War Board ukased the manufacturers to drop everything but strict essentials, and at once remarkable discoveries were made in the number of things, processes, commodities, and machineries we could easily get along without. Throughout all this period the National Chamber was the close ally and assistant of the board in securing every quickening betterment. When the war was over, when the board ceased from troubling and the highpressurists were at rest, the disciplined producing agencies began to relapse. But executives in the chamber had been taking good and careful note of all that reform had meant. They said that what was

good for production in war times must be good for production in peace times. They turned to the Department of Commerce, where they found the glad hand of Secretary Hoover thrust through the door at them, and together they complotted the revolution.

Of course there was much more to it than this. There always is much more to any great, general, and enduring trend to the fore. If some slack we leave here hanging out of our story we are to return to it later. We have enough now for a beginning that we may show practical reform at its most practical endeavor, as thus:

The Department of Commerce has built within itself a Division of Simplified Practice, direct outgrowth of the new idea about production. The National Chamber has built a Fabricated Production Department with a Waste Elimination Bureau. In both offices are staffs of experts tiptoed to start something. They look at an industry as a doctor looks at a patient; they conclude that it is suffering from fatty degeneration of too much. So the doctors in one office, or the other, or both, intimate to the leaders in that line of business that a national conference is one of the grandest things in the world, and the Chamber of Commerce of the United States has fourteen conference-rooms of different sizes admirably adapted to the needs of business men yearning for a heart-to-heart talk about things.

All such intimations must be made with tact and caution. The Department of Commerce of the United States government is without man

datory powers. It cannot order any factory to cease to make useless things; it cannot interfere in any way with our precious right to waste our own as we will. If it should attempt anything of that kind, up would rise the deafening howl of insulted freemen in all parts of our broad land. Captains of industry are not in the way of being told where they get off. Rather their habit is to do themselves the telling.

So the revolutionists go round to work. When the conference meets, the department and the chamber are prepared for it with the statistics and facts that show the waste. The conference usually takes one good look at these and appoints a committee to consider the spillage and how it may be stopped. It is a wise committee; it does not need to be argued or lured out of tradition's lethal grip. It reports a plan, the conference adopts the report to go into effect on a certain date as a trade agreement, and the next thing the retailer knows, instead of being bothered with twenty-seven kinds of wash-boilers, there is but one.

All this, being the affair of one trade, nobody else pays attention to. Yet day by day we pay attention to a thousand things that are nothing to us compared with this. For if we multiply the wasteful conditions about wash-boilers into every product of every factory, and follow along where that leads, at home and abroad -where shall we fetch up? Among figures that soar and sums that dazzle. In 1921 the Federated American Engineering Society experts, headed by Mr. Hoover, did exactly this. They undertook a sur

vey of conditions in six great typical American industries and laid bare things that struck the attentive into an amazed silence.

They found the preventable waste in these industries ranged from 29 to 64 per cent, the average waste among them all being 49 per cent, or nearly one half their total effort.

What were these six industries? Textiles, metals, boots and shoes, printing, building, men's ready-made clothing-six that were supposed to be among the most carefully managed of all that make our industrial greatness.

From this shattering fact they deduced another. They concluded that the total of preventable waste in all American industry must be something like ten billion dollars a year.

This was our first broad-gage enlightenment on a momentous subject. The total cost of all government in the United States, federal, state, and municipal, is only six billion dollars a year; so that if all of it were waste, graft, and incompetence we should not lose as much in it as we lose annually in business. Ten billion dollars a year-it is the total cost of all government, plus the cost of all automobiles sold here in a year, plus the cost of all the gasolene sold to run them, plus the cost of all the American homes built in a year. Ten billion dollars, and all

waste.

How waste? Waste in competition gone mad, in lost motions, in making things that few persons wanted or nobody at all, in duplications, septemplications, efforts to sell the unsalable. Ten billion dol

lars a year of it, after the War Industries had shown the better way. Not because of anybody's will or anybody's incompetence. Custom, competition, and tradition accounted for almost the whole of it—this evil triad and one other thing, which was the innate reluctance of the American to coöperate. "Every man for himself" was proving but a dumb-bell motto. Look at the results.

Upon this condition of disaster the plans of the department and the chamber arose with healing in their wings. As for instance, what do you know about paving-bricks? Probably not much; and care no more. What are paving-bricks to you or you to paving-bricks? Yet you might wisely know and care; if you live in the average interior city or town they come up annually in your tax-bill, and everywhere else they have meaning, for they are the typical American paving. Immense quantities are used for streets and roads; even where there is other paving material, these bricks are used between street railroad tracks.

Paving-bricks-up to 1922 there were sixty-six varieties of them manufactured in the United States. Why sixty-six? For that matter, why a million other useless things? Custom and habit; there had always been sixty-six; consequently sixty six persisted as the holy number, although every manufacturer knew that 84 per cent of the business was done in five of the sixty-six styles.

But to make the sixty-six the manufacturer must have sixty-six different molds and patterns. He must stop a factory hand at work with one pattern and have him

substitute another. He must have warehouse space to carry the sacred sixty-six, carrying many of them for years with little or no sale but with tax, interest, and insurance charges running all the time against them. He must invoice them and watch them and handle them as if they really meant something in his life, when they meant nothing except bother.

Meanwhile, what with the automobile, improved road-making, and the extension of paving, bricks became more and more an important industry, and the department and the chamber, going about to turn up such things, fell naturally upon brick superfluity. They induced the brickmakers to come to Washington in a national conference, November 15, 1921, reconvening March 27, 1922. The first slash recommended by the conference committee cut fifty-five styles out of the sacred sixty-six. The next year sacrificed four more. To-day instead of sixty-six varieties of paving-brick there are only four, the consumer is as well satisfied, work is better at the factories, and the manufacturers are saving a million dollars a year. As they came down from custom's barren ways they adopted a rule that any variety of brick that showed for three years less than 2 per cent of shipments should be cut out. That did the business. Production was simplified and increased; prices fell. Production costs were cut; profits increased. For consumer and maker, happiness reigned.

It is well we began with the homely slighted paving-brick, because otherwise when we come to some other commodities with which

revolution has been busy the results might seem highly improbable. The always lengthening list of industries remade now includes many that directly affect people's lives and households' budgets. Range-boilers afford one illustration. At the outset of the efficiency campaign the manufacturers were making 130 varieties. To produce them was a heavy burden; to store and try to distribute them another. As for the poor retailer, to carry them, account for them, protect them, and have capital invested in them, were so many items in the load he must try to shift, by one route or another, to the consumer's tottering back. There was a national conference, a committee, a report, and 117 varieties of range-boilers disappeared into the past.

Of hot-water storage-tanks there were 120 kinds. A committee cut out 106 of them and so slammed the door on Old Man Waste.

Hardware manufacturing underwent a great change. Of the simple tack and the unassuming nail 426 kinds were being made and marketed-more or less. A committee buried 247 of these. Of shovels, scoops, and spades there were 4460 varieties on the market. One of these might differ from another in the glory of curve or angle indiscernible to the layman's eye, but each had its own pattern, each meant time and labor lost when its pattern displaced another on the machine, each required handling, storing, invoicing; each meant so much in taxes, insurance, storagespace, and idle capital. A committee went through the list and actually knocked out 4076 of the

4460 varieties. Ninety-two per cent were found on investigation to be redundant. It is two years since this breaking of old idols was effected. The nation's digging, scooping, and spading have gone on as before, but about ten million dollars' worth of lost motion preliminary to the digging, scooping, and spading has been laid aside forever.

The use of concrete in building operations has necessitated steel reinforcing bars, of which about 600,000 tons are sold annually in the United States. In the days of hit-or-miss when there were forty varieties of steel reinforcing bars, some dealers felt obliged to carry as much as 150,000 or even 200,000 tons, for which the needless costs in space, time, labor, and capital were reflected in the cost of building and thence into the tenant's rent. After a committee had cut out twenty-nine of the forty varieties, the dealer that had carried 200,000 tons found he needed only 75,000, while $4,500,000 of annual waste had been elided from the nation's industry.

Plow-bolts would seem normally to be about as simple a thing as man could devise, and one plow-bolt about like another. Yet fifteen hundred varieties of them were manufactured in the United States. The imp of the perverse could hardly have gone further. When a farmer bought a plow with a certain kind of bolt and the time came to renew that bolt he must get one of the original kind if the country had to be raked to find it. Say the plows sold in one farming community comprised 400 kinds of bolts, the dealer in that town must keep on hand all of the 400, although of half of them he