2 The new generation and the revolution of truth
2Capital and industry must awake at once to the realization that truth, mechanical or abstract, is establishing itself in algebraic progression, and that the new home is the only salvation of economic chaos.
3 Look always to the new generations from now on for your economic indications. Children are constantly being reared in a profusion of newly established truths, unknown to those before them. Truths fought and struggled over in establishment by the latter are as accepted and clearly understood by the child, as the nose on his face. It took men one hundred and fifty thousand years to graduate from hot stone branding, as his only token of intercommunication, to the arrow head era. Vast stretches of time, while truth was slowly gaining headway, ‘till it gathered such speed that, but 300 short years ago, merely an eye blink in the computed four billion-year-old world, our fore-fathers came to this wilderness of a country, fleeing feudalism, and founded a state wherein truth, individualism, faith, and freedom of expression were permanently established as the right of mankind. Now look at the countless thousands, who, by saving enough capital or time, (through use of their brains, not their hands) for others and themselves, have accumulated a permanent competence. Faith in other men, and the loaning of their capital back to industry, instead of hoarding it as in the feudalistic days, provides this return.
4 Thousands daily sail from our shores apparently freed from consideration of drudgery forever, citizens of the world. But now we enter a period when profits are lessened and these competences are threatened. Competition and refinement only lowers the margin of return when the market approaches surfeit. Industry must find new fields of necessity to serve, to warrant its paying interest to outside capital. The industrially produced home, with its combined facilities, undreamed of hitherto by the most ambitious monarch, has no limit to its production. Compared to the home producing business, once it is underway, the motor car business, though in itself greatly improved by the new industry, will range in the same proportion to it, as the gasoline bill, in our annual budget, to our annual rent account.
5 Our children are called rebellious today. They as much as possible stay away from home and seek the environment of modern comfort, be it only in the hotel café. They know drudgery to be unnecessary and until it is removed from the home they will not return. They are tired of the silliness of parents who have left them to learn the secrets of life in the alleys. They refuse to acquire the taste for wooden, wretched, ill-lighted, drudgery sodden houses. They aren’t fooled by dressing up drudgery in a coat of many colors—therefore our city growth. Our great cities like all unbalanced masses are but revolutionary movements prior to adjustments. Persons intelligently informed in scientific and economic advance today, will be shocked to realize, through broad perspective and proportionment of the affairs of life, of the rotten, dank, pestilence breeding, construction of the homes of the great 95% of the population. They will be astonished to learn that the majority of houses today are still without even bathrooms, toilets, or sewage disposal, and are pasted, piled, and tacked together, after any plan or fashion of the dark ages. We don’t manufacture yachts, busses, ocean liners, or pullman cars of brick, stone, wood or concrete, in fact we couldn’t. Why should we manufacture houses of these unscientific materials? Is there any virtue in excess weight?
6 Our mammoth cities are only a makeshift on the highway of individualism. Approximately 26,000 people were killed last year by automobiles, 700,000 were seriously injured in the United States alone, mostly in our cities or closely thereto. It seems that as long as life is snuffed out individually, in so unnovel a manner, it is not a tragedy of catastrophic proportions, yet let twenty-six trans-Atlantic liners, Aquitania, Mauretania, Berengaria, Olympic, Etc., of a thousand passengers each, go down in one year, then the world would sit up and see what it was all about damn quickly. This way such statistics aren’t even good news stuff. Most of the deaths are too old—they occurred a month or two ago. But why did they occur? That is what counts, because cities are too crowded and against the law of natural progress.
7 As a matter of capital investment, don’t worry whether the public, if properly acquainted with the facts, will buy; not with a youth free to acceptance of new form so long as it is materially, mechanistically, and harmoniously good; and a million new brides and grooms created annually from out this youth. So long as there are thousands annually wiped out of house and home by fire, flood, and storm, will the market be enhanced. Those familiar with the obsolescence rate of dwellings know the vast market from this source alone. It is all a matter of competent organization, design and advertising.
8 From a loan point of view, compare a rotting thing of wood, built after a billion different patterns, two thirds of the cost of which is labor, for which there is practically no resale value in the material; as against a house of standardized parts, composed of material practically wear proof, any surface feature of which is replaceable without reference to structural support. How much value have the so-called ‘‘orphans’’ in the second-hand car market? Someone’s made to order job that may have cost 520,000, sells in a couple of years for 5200, in the second hand exchange; while the standard, quantity production makes, such as the Buicks and Fords, with low initial cost and great ability, have but a minor depreciation, after the initial drop. A house designed of twentieth century materials will justify at least a ten-year payment, if an automobile, with all its risk of collision and heavy road wear, can now bear eighteen months. The industrially produced home will open up an era of credit stability hardly conceived of.
9 The twentieth century industrially produced home is the solution, right under our nose, while we look to the clouds or through the microscope, for ‘‘what ails us’’, crying ‘‘Prosperity’’ with thundering echo lest we lose our courage in the face of smaller and smaller profits, we suddenly find the solution, simple and clear.