Ragtime (14 page)

In the morning he picked up a discarded newspaper. On the front page was an account of the police terror in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He found his cigarettes in their box in his pocket and smoked and read the paper. An editorial called for an investigation of the outrage by the Federal Government. So that was it, the strike would be won. But then what? He heard the clacking of the looms. A salary of six dollars and change. Would that transform their lives? They would still live in that wretched room, in that terrible dark street. Tateh shook his head. This country will not let me breathe. In this mood he slowly came to the decision not to go back to
Lawrence, Massachusetts. His belongings, his rags, he would leave to the landlord. What do you have with you, he said to his daughter. She showed him the contents of her small satchel—things she had taken for her trip away from home. Her underthings, her comb and brush, a hair clasp, garters, stockings, and the books he had made for her of the trolley car and the skater. From this moment, perhaps, Tateh began to conceive of his life as separate from the fate of the working class. I hate machines, he said to his daughter. He stood and she stood and took his hand and together they looked for the exit. The I.W.W. has won, he said. But what has it won? A few more pennies in wages. Will it now own the mills? No.

They cleaned and refreshed themselves in the public lavatories. They went to the station café for a breakfast of rolls and coffee and spent the day walking through the streets of Philadelphia. It was cold and the sun was shining. They looked in the windows of the stores and when their feet began to ache from the cold they walked into a department store to warm up. It was a vast emporium, every aisle crowded with shoppers. The girl noticed with interest that wire baskets swung from moving cables over the counters. They carried the money and receipts back and forth from the counters to the cashier. The sales clerks yanked on wooden-handled rope pulls to bring the baskets down and pulled on other ropes to get them back up. Mannequins, like grown-up dolls, sported satin toques and broad-brimmed hats plumed with egret feathers. One of these hats is more than a week’s wages, Tateh said.

Later, on the streets again, they walked past iron-front buildings where trucks were pulled up to warehouse platforms. The windows of supply companies and wholesalers offered little of interest. But then her eye was attracted to the dirty window in which were displayed all the gimcracks of a mail-order novelty company. At this time businessmen were discovering the profit in practical jokes and parlor magic tricks. There were exploding cigars, rubber roses for the lapel that squirted water, boxes of sneezing powder, telescopes that left black eyes, exploding card decks, sound bladders for placing under chair cushions, glass paperweights with winter scenes on which snow fell when you shook them, exploding matches, punch-boards, little lead liberty bells and statues of liberty, magic rings, exploding fountain pens, books that told you the meaning of dreams, rubber Egyptian belly dancers, exploding watches, exploding eggs.

Tateh stared at the window long after the girl’s interest had waned. He led her into the store. Tateh removed his hat and spoke to a man in a striped shirt with sleeve garters who came forward to meet them. The man was amiable. Sure, he said, let’s see it. Tateh took the girl’s satchel, put it on the counter and, opening it, withdrew the book of the skater. Standing next to the proprietor he held the book at arm’s length and expertly flipped the pages. The little girl skated forward and skated away, did a figure eight, came back, went into a pirouette and made a graceful bow. The man’s eyebrows went up. He stuck out his lower lip. Let me try that, he said.

An hour later Tateh walked out of there with twenty-five dollars in cash and a letter of agreement which he had signed calling for four more books at twenty-five dollars each. The company—its name was the Franklin Novelty Company—would publish the books and add them to its line. For purposes of the contract they were called movie books. Come, Tateh said to his child, we’ll find a boardinghouse in a good neighborhood and then we’ll have ourselves a meal and a hot bath.

T
hus did the artist point his life along the lines of flow of American energy. Workers would strike and die but in the streets of cities an entrepreneur could cook sweet potatoes in a bucket of hot coals and sell them for a penny or two. A smiling hurdy-gurdy man could fill his cup. Phil the Fiddler, undaunted by the snow, cut away the fingers of his gloves and played under the lighted windows of mansions. Frank the Cash Boy kept his eyes open for a runaway horse carrying the daughter of a Wall Street broker. All across the continent merchants pressed the large round keys of their registers. The value of the duplicable event was everywhere perceived. Every town had its ice-cream soda fountain of Belgian marble. Painless Parker the Dentist everywhere offered to remove your toothache. At Highland Park, Michigan, the first Model T automobile built on a moving assembly line lurched down a ramp and came to rest in the grass under a clear sky. It was black and ungainly and stood high off the ground. Its inventor regarded it from a distance. His derby was tilted back on his head. He chewed on a piece of straw. In his left hand he held a pocket watch. The employer of many men, a good number of them
foreign-born, he had long believed that most human beings were too dumb to make a good living. He’d conceived the idea of breaking down the work operations in the assembly of an automobile to their simplest steps, so that any fool could perform them. Instead of having one man learn the hundreds of tasks in the building of one motorcar, walking him hither and yon to pick out the parts from a general inventory, why not stand him in his place, have him do just one task over and over, and let the parts come past him on moving belts. Thus the worker’s mental capacity would not be taxed. The man who puts in a bolt does not put on the nut, the inventor said to his associates. The man who puts on the nut does not tighten it. He had a way with words. He had gotten his inspiration from a visit to a beef-packing concern where the cows were swung through the plant hanging in slings from overhead cables. With his tongue he moved the straw from one corner of his mouth to the other. He looked at his watch again. Part of his genius consisted of seeming to his executives and competitors not as quick-witted as they. He brushed the grass with the tip of his shoe. Exactly six minutes after the car had rolled down the ramp an identical car appeared at the top of the ramp, stood for a moment pointed at the cold early morning sun, then rolled down and crashed into the rear of the first one. Henry Ford had once been an ordinary automobile manufacturer. Now he experienced an ecstasy greater and more intense than that vouchsafed to any American before him, not excepting Thomas Jefferson. He had caused a machine to replicate itself endlessly. His
executives and managers and assistants crowded around him to shake his hand. Tears were in their eyes. He allotted sixty seconds on his pocket watch for a display of sentiment. Then he sent everyone back to work. He knew there were refinements to be made and he was right. By controlling the speed of the moving belts he could control the workers’ rate of production. He did not want a worker to stoop over or to take more than one step from his work site. The worker must have every second necessary for his job but not a single unnecessary second. From these principles Ford established the final proposition of the theory of industrial manufacture—not only that the parts of the finished product be interchangeable, but that the men who build the products be themselves interchangeable parts. Soon he was producing three thousand cars a month and selling them to the multitudes. He was to live a long and active life. He loved birds and animals and counted among his friends John Burroughs, an old naturalist who studied the humble creatures of the woodland—chipmunk and raccoon, junko, wren and chickadee.

B
ut Ford’s achievement did not put him at the top of the business pyramid. Only one man occupied that lofty place.

The offices of the J. P. Morgan Company were at 23 Wall Street. The great financier came to work one morning dressed in a dark blue suit, a black overcoat with a collar of lamb’s wool and a top hat. He affected fashions slightly out of date. When he stepped out of his limousine the car robe fell around his feet. One of the several bank officers who had rushed out to meet him disentangled the robe and hung it over the robe rail on the inside of the door. The chauffeur thanked him profusely. Somehow the speaking tube had come off its hook and another officer of the bank replaced it. In the meantime Morgan had marched into the building, assistants, aides and even some of the firm’s customers circling him like birds. Morgan carried a gold-headed cane. He was at this time in his seventy-fifth year of life—a burly six-footer with a large head of sparse white hair, a white moustache and fierce intolerant eyes set just close enough to suggest the psy-chopathology of his will. Accepting the obeisances of his employees, he strode to his office, a modest glass-paneled
room on the main floor of the bank where he was visible to everyone and everyone to him. He was helped with his hat and coat. He was wearing a wing collar and an ascot. He sat down behind his desk, and ignoring the depositors’ accounts which were usually the first thing he looked at, said to his aides I want to meet that tinkering fellow. What’s his name. The motorcar mechanic. Ford.

He had sensed in Ford’s achievement a lust for order as imperial as his own. This was the first sign given to him in some time that he might not be alone on the planet. Pierpont Morgan was that classic American hero, a man born to extreme wealth who by dint of hard work and ruthlessness multiplies the family fortune till it is out of sight. He controlled 741 directorships in 112 corporations. He had once arranged a loan to the United States Government that had saved it from bankruptcy. He had single-handedly stopped the panic of 1907 by arranging for the importation of one hundred million dollars in gold bullion. Moving about in private railroad cars or yachts he crossed all borders and was at home everywhere in the world. He was a monarch of the invisible, transnational kingdom of capital whose sovereignty was everywhere granted. Commanding resources that beggared royal fortunes, he was a revolutionist who left to presidents and kings their territory while he took control of their railroads and shipping lines, banks and trust companies, industrial plants and public utilities. For years he had surrounded himself with parties of friends and acquaintances, always screening them in his mind for the personal
characteristics that might indicate less regard for him than they admitted. He was invariably disappointed. Everywhere men deferred to him and women shamed themselves. He knew as no one else the cold and barren reaches of unlimited success. The ordinary operations of his intelligence and instinct over the past fifty years had made him preeminent in the affairs of nations and he thought this said little for mankind. Only one thing served to remind Pierpont Morgan of his humanity and that was a chronic skin disease that had colonized his nose and made of it a strawberry of the award-winning giant type grown by California’s wizard of horticulture Luther Burbank. This affliction had come to Morgan in his young manhood. As he grew older and richer the nose grew larger. He learned to stare down people who looked at it, but every day of his life, when he arose, he examined it in the mirror, finding it indeed loathsome but at the same time exquisitely satisfying. It seemed to him that every time he made an acquisition or manipulated a bond issue or took over an industry, another bright red pericarp burst into bloom. His favorite story in literature was a tale of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s entitled “The Birthmark,” which told of an extraordinarily lovely woman whose beauty was perfect except for a small birthmark on her cheek. When her husband, a natural scientist, made her drink a potion designed to rid her of this imperfection, the birthmark disappeared; but as its last faintest outline vanished from her skin and she was perfect, she died. To Morgan, the disfigurement of his monstrous nose was the touch of God upon him, the
assurance of mortality. It was the steadiest assurance he had.