John Passos - Big Money

He was a crank about shovels, every job had to have a shovel of the right weight and size for that job alone; every job had to have a man of the right weight and size for that job alone; but when he began to pay his men in proportion to the increased efficiency of their work,

the owners who were a lot of greedy smalleyed Dutchmen began to raise Hail Columbia; when Schwab bought Bethlehem Steel in 1901

Fred Taylor

inventor of efficiency

who had doubled the production of the stampingmill by speeding up the main lines of shafting from ninetysix to twohundred and twentyfive revolutions a minute

was unceremoniously fired.

After that Fred Taylor always said he couldn’t afford to work for money.

He took to playing golf (using golfclubs of his own design), doping out methods for transplanting huge boxtrees into the garden of his home.

At Boxly in Germantown he kept open house for engineers, factorymanagers, industrialists;

he wrote papers,

lectured in colleges,

appeared before a congressional committee,

everywhere preached the virtues of scientific management and the Barth slide rule, the cutting down of waste and idleness, the substitution for skilled mechanics of the plain handyman (like Schmidt the pigiron handler) who’d move as he was told

and work by the piece:

production;

more steel rails more bicycles more spools of thread more armorplate for battleships more bedpans more barbedwire more needles more lightningrods more ballbearings more dollarbills;

(the old Quaker families of Germantown were growing rich, the Pennsylvania millionaires were breeding billionaires out of iron and coal)

production would make every firstclass American rich who was willing to work at piecework and not drink or raise Cain or think or stand mooning at his lathe.

Thrifty Schmidt the pigiron handler can invest his money and get to be an owner like Schwab and the rest of the greedy smalleyed Dutchmen and cultivate a taste for Bach and have hundredyearold boxtrees in his garden at Bethlehem or Germantown or Chestnut Hill,

and lay down the rules of conduct;

the American plan.

But Fred Taylor never saw the working of the American plan;

in 1915 he went to the hospital in Philadelphia suffering from a breakdown.

Pneumonia developed; the nightnurse heard him winding his watch;

on the morning of his fiftyninth birthday, when the nurse went into his room to look at him at fourthirty,

he was dead with his watch in his hand.

these are the men for whom the rabid lawless, anarchistic element of society in this country has been laboring ever since sentence was imposed, and of late they have been augmented by many good lawabiding citizens who have been misled by the subtle arguments of those propagandists

The times are hard and the wages low

Leave her Johnny leave her

The bread is hard and the beef is salt

It’s time for us to leave her

BANKERS HAIL ERA OF EXPANSION

PROSPERITY FOR ALL SEEN ASSURED

Find German Love of Caviar a Danger to Stable Money

EX-SERVICE MEN DEMAND JOBS

No one knows

No one cares if I’m weary

Oh how soon they forgot Château-Thierry

WE FEEL VERY FRIENDLY TOWARDS THE

TYPEWRITER USERS OF NEW YORK CITY

JOBLESS RIOT AT AGENCY

Ships in de oceans

Rocks in de sea

Blond-headed woman

Made a fool outa me

throat tightens when the redstacked steamer churning the faintlyheaving slatecolored swell swerves shaking in a long green-marbled curve past the red lightship

spine stiffens with the remembered chill of the offshore Atlantic

and the jag of framehouses in the west above the invisible land and spiderweb rollercoasters and the chewinggum towers of Coney and the freighters with their stacks way aft and the blur beyond Sandy Hook

and the smell of saltmarshes warmclammysweet

remembered bays silvery inlets barred with trestles

the put put before day of a gasolineboat way up the creek

raked masts of bugeyes against straight tall pines on the shell-white beach

the limeycold reek of an oysterboat in winter

and creak of rockers on the porch of the scrollsaw cottage and uncles voices pokerface stories told sideways out of the big mouth (from Missouri who took no rubber nickels) the redskin in the buffalorobe selling snakeroot in the flare of oratorical redfire the sulphury choke and the hookandladder clanging down the redbrick street while the clinging firemen with uncles’ faces pull on their rubbercoats

and the crunch of whitecorn muffins and coffee with cream gulped in a hurry before traintime and apartmenthouse mornings stifling with newspapers and the smooth powdery feel of new greenbacks and the whack of a cop’s billy cracking a citizen’s skull and the faces blurred with newsprint of men in jail

the whine and shriek of the buzzsaw and the tipsy smell of raw lumber and straggling through slagheaps through fireweed through wasted woodlands the shantytowns the shantytowns

what good burying those years in the old graveyard by the brokendown brick church that morning in the spring when the sandy lanes were streaked with blue puddles and the air was violets and pineneedles

what good burying those hated years in the latrinestench at Brocourt under the starshells

if today the crookedfaced customsinspector with the soft tough talk the burring speech the funnypaper antics of thick hands jerking thumb

(So you brought home French books didjer?)

is my uncle

boy seeking future offered opportunity… good positions for bright… CHANCE FOR ADVANCEMENT… boy to learn… errand boy… officeboy

YOUNG MAN WANTED

Oh tell me how long

I’ll have to wait

OPPORTUNITY

in bank that chooses its officers from the ranks, for wideawake ambitious bookkeeper… architectural draftsman with experience on factory and industrial buildings in brick, timber, and reinforced concrete… bronze fitter… letterer… patternmaker… carriage painter… first class striper and finisher… young man for hosiery, underwear and notion house… assistant in order department… first class penman accurate at figures… energetic hardworker for setting dies in power presses for metal parts

canvasser… flavor chemist… freight elevator man… house salesman… insurance man… insurance man… invoice clerk… jeweler… laborer… machinist… milling machine man… shipping clerk… shipping clerk… shipping clerk… shoe salesman… signwriter… solicitor for retail fishmarket… teacher… timekeeper… tool and diemaker, tracer, toolroom foreman, translator, typist… window trimmer… wrapper

OPPORTUNITY FOR

Do I get it now

Or must I hesitate

young man not afraid of hard work

young man for office

young man for stockroom

young man as stenographer

young man to travel

young man to learn

OPPORTUNITY

Oh tell me how long

to superintend municipal light, water and ice plant in beautiful growing, healthful town in Florida’s highlands… to take charge of underwear department in large wholesale mail house… to assist in railroad investigation… to take charge of about twenty men on tools, dies, gigs and gauges… as bookkeeper in stockroom… for light porter work… civil engineer… machinery and die appraiser… building estimator… electrical and power plant engineer

the unnamed arrival

(who had hung from the pommel of the unshod white stallion’s saddle