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provision made for the health and training of its army of employees. Eight or nine thousand people make up a fairsized town, but few or no towns of that size provide their inhabitants with the medical care that employees receive by right of their pay check. Each must belong to the Mutual Aid Association, entirely controlled by the workers, which receives a fraction from the weekly wage for sick benefits. This fund is doubled by the management.

When an employee is ill at the store, medical care is given free, at clinics which rival modern hospitals. Treatment ranging from routine spraying of noses and throats to malted milk for undernourished girls is provided and accepted. Dental attention must be paid for, but at half the usual prices and on the employers' time. The cafeteria is a model of light and cleanliness, with wholesome food at minimum rates. There are rest-rooms available for every clerk for two periods of fifteen minutes mornings and afternoons. Adjacent are the book-shelves and easy chairs of a reading and circulating library.

The training department arranges classes for all grades of employees, with emphasis, of course, on the rookie. When Anna Jones comes for a selling job, she is first given a simple completion test to fill in. It is so simple that it looks like a joke, and the interesting thing about it is that 5 per cent fail to make a 33 per cent passing grade on such sentences as, "A home is merely a place live comfortably;" or, "It is sometimes between two of action." Once past this easy obstacle, Anna goes for a medical examination, and finally becomes an entrant in the course for explaining the making of sales checks, exchanges, refunds, etc. There are special classes covering company policies and service features, as well as specialized courses in merchandise.

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The planning department, a division of research and methods, is proud of its work on the design and standardization of chairs and coat and hat lockers, and especially on desks for cash girls in the pneumatic-tube rooms. This last is a model of planning based on careful time studies. It is possible, because it has been done, for a girl to make change 300 times in one hour-four seconds to check the cash slip, make the change, and send back the holder being her top speed. The girl who does this for eight hours of the day seems no more than normally tired at the end of the week. It would be worth while to keep her under observation to learn, if possible, what sort of mind she has, and what effect the constant addition and subtrac

tion has on her nerves. In studying stores I saw how difficult it is to make the human equation measure up to the mechanical. It is the basic problem in management, I suppose, to get the machinery geared to the people who must run it. When it comes to delivering 4,000 bulky articles from the furniture department in one day, as happened recently, or a total from the whole recently, or a total from the whole store of 9,000,000 purchases in one year, then it is a difficult task to keep the wheels from going round too fast for the wheels from going round too fast for the men and women who tend them, and to make the rank and file able to keep up with the machine.

WE

HEN I walked up Fifth Avenue to the other store, it was, so far as its population of 2,000 employees is concerned, like moving from a town to a village.

Here the salespeople no longer work on the commission basis. All that has been changed, and the minimum wage paid to adult experienced saleswomen is $20 a week, a rise of $14 over the "fair" standard hoped for twenty years ago. Even the youngsters of fifteen are paid $10 a week, and the store provides the continuation training of four hours a week on its own time. It is optional whether employees shall belong to the Mutual Welfare Association, but the large majority do belong. A savingsaccount system is fostered by the management, and a vigorous interest in recreation and health is manifest. There are both hospital and dental clinics, and a chiropodist who tends to weary feet at so tiny a charge that it seems an economic luxury to go to him.

The employees' convenience and pleasure are served by a sun-parlor, a roof court with easy chairs and awnings, an court with easy chairs and awnings, an open-air handball court where juniors shout at their play after the morning continuation school period; by a cafeteria where there is no clatter of trays and dishes; by six employees' parties in the assembly hall throughout the year, with supper served by the firm; by a spacious library-the most expensive comforts in all New York, provided as a matter of business efficiency by employers who pride themselves on knowing their job.

The vivid, alert woman at the head of the training department explained to me this careful personnel work of the store from a new angle. She spoke of the standardization of the majority of merchandise sold in all of the half-dozen high-price stores along the avenue, of which this was one. Each of them also maintains a comparative shopping bureau by which prices are standardized.

That leaves only service. in which com

petition is keen. "You can buy the same stocking for $2.75 here as in So-andSo's, or in Blank & Blank's," said she, naming different competitors; "you can even occasionally get a copy of the same model dress. What are we to do to make you want to come here rather than to any other shop? We want you as a regular customer, not as an occasional purchaser; and to get you we must give better service than you can get at the other stores. We can't do that unless our salespeople are intelligent and contented, and have a decent standard of living of their own."

The "floor-walker," with his longtailed coat and solemn mien, has passed from the scene. The "section-manager" has taken his place. He is the fount of all authority and the well of wisdom for the "sales-person." She consults him on every imaginable difficulty and turns to him for all the manifold permissions which hedge the life of an employee in a great organization. He reports to his service manager, who in turn reports to the senior service manager. The hierarchy extends all the way up to the president of the Board of Directors.

What does this regimented scheme of organization do to the spirit of the "common soldier"-the rank and file? Is it elastic enough to stretch to the individual's need for adjustment he so seldom receives and the lack of which the private soldier so often resents?

A

RE the department stores acting as public service organizations in cultivating and training their constantly changing armies along these lines? Are they a factor for good in the social life of the community by reason of their care for the physical and recreational wellbeing of the thousands who "only stand and serve"? Or, on the other hand, is the individual driven too hard by the machine?

These questions, even unformulated, could hardly have lurked in the minds of those good ladies of the Consumers' League who set out so long ago to remedy the "wrongs" of the girls behind the counter. The problem was quite simply then one of abnormally low wages and dismally long hours. It has shifted now (I am, of course, speaking only of the better-class organizations) to that of mass supervision, with its increased demands for pleasant and efficient service towards thousands, where in the old days the clerks dealt only with hundreds. What chance does quantity distribution leave for individual initiative, relaxation, or change?

The problem is more subtle than the earlier one. It is serious enough to challenge consideration.

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A shonning center with no billboards and where even the window cards are subiect to the approval of the lessor

The Spanish missions of the far Southwest find at the beginning of the Sante Fe Trail in Kansas City architectural symbols of their faith

it keeps right on going. Southwesterly, by the steel tracks that carry herds of cattle to its "second largest meat-packing center in the world"-packing-houses, and by the shiny-surfaced trails of the covered gas wagon, K. C. billboards blaze the way into New Mexico and through Oklahoma into the Panhandle of Texas. K. C.'s newspapers go clear across Kansas for breakfast. In the journalistic firmament of the Southwest the Kansas City "Star" is the center of a small constellation shining bright through the night of circulation-mongering sensationalism and daily advertising catalogues published as news-print.

In the ballyhoo of its boosters and boomers the fine old town of Kansas is being "sold" as "the Heart of America." Its citizens of that ilk, when leaving homeward-bound by train or motor car from Chicago or New York, or even St. Louis, like to speak of themselves as

"going out to America." That's not so. A number of other cities and localities are equally cardiac in these United are equally cardiac in these United States, not counting all the other AmerStates, not counting all the other Americas. But a big American heart of its own has Kansas City. He who runs through the Middle West of United States America may here read (in fact, willy-nilly he has got to read) the usual jargon of the "realtors," the convention conjurors, and the tourist teasers-lift the headlines and the same text will fit any locality entered in the municipal Marathon-about the "biggest" and the "best," the "homes" and hospitals, climate and pipe-organ and sky-line.

"Market-Basket of the World" these gentry emblazon on the otherwise modest landscape of their alluvial valleys, est landscape of their alluvial valleys, proclaiming the pre-eminence of K. C. in the things of the stomach. "Most Beautiful City in the World" blare their colleagues; "First in Distribution of

Seeds" blow other patriots; and "Third in Production of Soap" bubbles anticlimatically the paid chorus.

Let them rave. Concede the soap. As for the "seeds," there's some food for thought in them. Much of the rest here as elsewhere, in the language of prophets not without honor in their own countries, "is the bunk." If he who runs will stop running for a while where the clearer stream of Kaw runs forever into the muddy Missouri, dividing two States and the little city of Kansas from metropolitan Kansas City, he may read beneath the ballyhoo a better text, he will catch a truer note, discern something of the city's real worth in the world.

If he runs into K. C. from any point of the compass by train, he will fetch up in the Union Station-"third largest in the United States," naturally-and, passing out through the marble concourse, he will inevitably come face to face with the symbol of Kansas City's rightful claim to distinction, a pillar of stone by day and of fire by night, set on the city's highest promontory at the spot where began the old Santa Fé Trail, a beacon to light for this and for coming generations the pathway to peace.

Stepping from his train in this same Union Station not so very long ago, the deposed sculptor of Stone Mountain, confronting the Kansas City Memorial, saw in its uncompleted state, as he was reported in the Kansas and Missouri papers, only "a shot tower" or "a factory chimney." Other critics have found the high column and its surrounding architectural composition lacking in the attributes conventionally expected in structures commemorative of the Great War. Thus to judge it is to miss entirely the high thought of those citizens of the Missouri Kansas City-the old men who have seen visions and the young men who have dared to dream uncommercial dreams-who in their thinking have indeed come close to the real heart of America and set the symbol of that thought in the heart of their city.

In Minneapolis some other reverent thinking has planted in living ranks along Victory Boulevard thousands of young elms, each tree commemorative of a son of Minnesota fallen in the war. "Only God can make a tree"-and a man. Minnesota uncovers and bows its head. At Vancouver and Winnipeg and at Montreal, from one end to the other of its Dominion, the Canadian Pacific Railroad, in tribute to its war dead, has put up facsimile statues standing for sacrificial victory in death. A Valkyrie sort of angel bears aloft to a Christian Valhalla the inert form of a Canadian infantryman "gone West."

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In the presence of these true memorials, as at the grave of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington or before the Cenotaph in London, eyes go down, thought turns backward, the mood is triste and retrospective. Kansas City does this new thing symbolically; it turns its back on the war and faces forward, "heads up!" It takes the vast grieving and sense of loss, the gathering retroactive momentum stillborn of war, and makes it serve a helpful purpose. It takes less thought for laurels than for a shining peace. And so where once the stage-coaches started west on the Santa Fé Trail and where now the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fé starts to lay its soft-coal spoor on the self-same way to New and old Mexico, Kansas City has marked another highway. And this starting-point on the road to new and better thinking is not subordinated to the stockyards and the new reinforced-concrete structure of the fivemillion-dollar mail-order business. Of enduring stone, quarried out of the foundations of the Middle West, it is the most conspicuous object, the most distinctive subject, in the whole city. Wherever in their several wards of the metropolitan area-in Rosedale or Randolph, in North Kansas City on the far side of the Missouri, or Kansas City west of the Kaw-the five-hundred-odd thousand citizens of Greater Kansas City go about their daily jobs, whenever they lift up their eyes they will see, rising above the gasoline and the tires, the chewing-gum and the cigarettes, silently and serenely dominating all the strident proclaiming of the things of the stomach, this one high altar to the things of the spirit.

When the patriots of Kansas City got together to dedicate something out of the emotions aroused by the war which might most worthily commemorate those of their number who had gone before on the long trail and inspire those coming after, they sought first, not a plan, but a man-some cunning, big-visioned human agency who might most faithfully interpret the generous and forward-looking personality of their city at its possible best. The two million dollars necessary to the realization of the project in its entirety was raised in one week. That's heart for you, too. It's one thing to think or dream big; another thing to back up the dream or the thought in giving.

"How's the bond drive going?" says the visiting salesman in Kansas City. "What do you mean, drive?" replies the local Missourian. "It was over the day it started."

All kinds of Kansas City contributed to that two million: Jews and Gentiles,

Rus in Urbe

This trail winds within the corporate limits of Kansas City

wets and drys, white and black. No building, no hall or temple, said the Negroes; give them something they could look at equally with all the rest. The founders of the Memorial Association and the man they chose, realizing their vaguer thought in his definite form, have raised up, then, this altar that all the half-million people they represented may look at equally. It is the community's investment, an investment in an estate more real than the urban or suburban "developments" which also do great credit to the city. Two million dollars freely out of the pockets of Kansas City; and, no less freely, year by year, many more million thoughts out of the hearts of Kansas City. By contrivances of steam-fitters and electricians, unseen in the three-hundred-foot shaft of the central column, a white smoke will ascend from its summit all the daylight hours and a fire will burn throughout the night.

And the smoke curling upward on the high altar that Kansas City has set up, the fire they have kindled in the heart of the city, not eternal but as everlasting as the patient faith of humanity, is intended to be a vital, living thing; a symbol, not of the inert peace that is less desirable than noble war, but a peace of sacrifice and fire.

This is the big, the distinctive thing in K. C., bigger than the ballyhoo. If you like or are so by nature disposed, you can see in the soaring shaft of stone only a factory chimney smoking with prosperity, the unquestionable prosperity of a great Mid-Western city, the onestoried memorial buildings on either side, and the buttressed wall forming the rest of an imposing plant. It's up to you, just as it is daily up to the half-million citizens for whom it stands.

Kansas City, "First in Distribution of Seeds"-and what of the Harvest?

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H

The Book Table

Edited by EDMUND PEARSON

Books About the British Drama

Reviewed by Brander MatthEWS

ALF a dozen years ago Professor George C. D. Odell published his solidly documented, amusingly written, and superbly illustrated volumes, "Shakespere from Betterton to Irving," in which he set before us the stage-histories of the tragedies and the comedies from the reopening of the London theaters after the Restoration to the end of the nineteenth century, supplying us with ample information about the many modifications of the text, the mangling of the story, the method of production, and the merit of the actors who successively impersonated the more In his stately tomes Professor Odell did what no one had attempted before him; and he did it so thoroughly that no one will need, ever to do it again.

Europe-Next Year? important characters.

Send one dollar to "My Travel-Log" Company, Box 1, Station C, Buffalo, N. Y., for memorandum book covering every traveler's need. Money returned if dissatisfied.

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This book is for those who wish to keep physically fit and maintain normal weight. Not intended as a guide for chronic invalids as all such cases require the care of a competent physician. Name and address on card will bring it without cost or obligation.

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Shakespeare is the foremost of the Elizabethan dramatic poets, but he had not a few distinguished comrades; and it is to be hoped that scholars, British or American, will supply us sooner or later with adequate stage-histories of the plays of Marlowe, who was Shakespeare's predecessor; of Ben Jonson, who was Shakespeare's younger contemporary; and of Massinger, who was Shakespeare's follower (and imitator). Here in New York a century ago Edmund Kean acted Barrabas in Marlowe's "Jew of Malta;" in London three-quarters of a century ago Charles Dickens acted Bobadil in Jonson's "Every Man in His Humor;" and in New York again half a century ago both Edwin Booth and E. L. Davenport acted Sir Giles Overreach in Massinger's "New Way to Pay Old Debts"-which Mr. Walter Hampden has recently promised to revive for us.

But the stage-history of the plays traditionally credited to Beaumont and Fletcher would be at least as interesting as that of the plays of Marlowe or of Jonson or of Massinger; and it is the most interesting period in the stage-history of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays Arthur Colton Sprague has

Restoration-that is to say, that he begins his story with the organization of Davenant's company in 1660, after the dark days of the drama under the Commonwealth, and he closes his narrative with the death of Betterton in 1710. It was in these decades that the Beaumont and Fletcher plays had their greatest popularity in the playhouse. For the playgoers of those decades they were more pleasing than were the tragedies and comedies of Shakespeare. In the first three years after the reopening of the theaters twenty-four of the Beaumont and Fletcher pieces were produced, apparently without alteration; and in these same years only eight of Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies were seen on the stage.

Throughout the period Dr. Sprague is dealing with there were many more performances of the Beaumont and Fletcher plays than of the Shakespeare plays, perhaps too high-minded, too austere, for the corrupted taste of the Court. It is significant that of the twenty identifiable plays performed at the Inner Temple from 1660 to 1688, there were seven by Beaumont and Fletcher and not a single one by Shakespeare. Dr. Sprague wisely abstains from going into the obscure problem of the authorship of each of the half hundred dramas, comedies, tragedies, and tragicomedies which are loosely lumped together as due to the collaboration of Beaumont and Fletcher; he has decided that ascriptions of authorship are beside his purpose; and he holds that the many characteristics these various pieces have in common are sufficient to justify him in continuing to treat them as a group.

Dr. Sprague has done well what he set out to do; and it was well worth doing. He is scholarly without being pedantic, full without being fatiguing, and cheerful without factitious liveliness. His bibliography is ample and his index is concise and there are few things more annoying to a student than an un

The Pratt Teachers Agency that Dr consider in the beautifully duly elaborated index. His illustrations

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Recommends teachers to colleges, public and private schools.

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chosen to printed volume recently published by the Harvard University Press. Dr. Sprague has limited his researches to the

1 Beaumont and Fletcher on the Restoration Stage. By Arthur Colby Sprague. The Harvard University Press, Cambridge. $4.

are only a few, but they are well chosen. His book deserves a warm welcome from those of us who prefer to consider the dramatic poets as dramatists rather than as poets.

Professor Ernest Bradley Watson's

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