Chapter 34
SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY ‘‘TAKE OFF’’ AS THE BOYS ‘‘GET
DOWN’’ TO BUSINESS
2It is evident that those industrial activities which we explore CONSCIOUSLY and rationalize ABSTRACTLY, rather than follow blindly through chance emergence, will automatically increase nol only their specific satisfactions for popular man but, also, the scope of their activity. So doing, they must inevitably become ever more powerful in comparison to groping notion-and-whim conducted predatory businesses.
3 Exploiters who are dominantly materialistic-minded and who grant naught to right but espouse might as a means of progress will find in this truth cause for reflection of little comfort. Both the dinosaur and the giant mammalian mastodon have fallen by the wayside. Might made little right for them, and in any great swamp today more mosquitoes—tiny flying machines—are in circulation than there are men on earth. It’s the microbes that would get us if our fate were confined to the dictate of Fincap. The further up the type scale we go in the size of integral living entities, the scarcer the individual becomes. On the other hand, numbers increase as we go down the scale in size of living entities. The scale into ephemerally small is exactly like the scale of 1 into 2; 1 into 3; 3 into 4, and so on.
4 By dint of fear and emergency ‘‘indirection’’ rather than by rationalized consideration of the ephemeralization trend, Fincap has been forced to retire into highly abstract monopolies as his last stronghold. By ‘‘dint of fear’’ is a scientific and not just an emotional
5 actuality. There have been scientific invention exceptions that were patronized directly and immediately by Fincap, but they have been obviously fear-motivated patronages. To wit: the immediate availability of huge ‘‘Foundation’’ sums for research and invention in the medical world, whose end-results are constantly applicable to the frailties and diseases of the aging capitalists who cannot buy health at any price in their own exploitation markets, and whose fear of death or mortal or even ‘‘potency’’ loss to self is wonderfully dominant over the pro-social longings, under the banner of which they underwrite ‘‘Foundations.’’ Let any proletarian seek the latest research aid in medicine and this is soon evident.
6 It is appropriate here to remark that the surgical and medical boys through their ‘‘frats,’’ under guise of ‘‘protecting’’ the public against inferior service and exploitation, recently stated that they were unswervingly against the socialization of medical care even in the most common categories. Suddenly and revealingly they have reversed their policy and ostensibly ‘‘endorse’’ planned medical ‘‘care’’ under the leadership of state and county medical societies. They even offer ‘‘to act specifically as a clearing house in the initiation, development and functioning of what may well evolve into a comprehensive system of medical care for all the people according to the American plan of medical practice,’’ the ‘‘American plan’’ being, of course, the joker—that of ‘‘scarcity’’ price demands. Traditional practice is still determined to smoke-screen, by such specious, fly in the ointment statements, the significance of the offensive recently launched by 430 highest-type, widely accredited ‘‘rebel physicians’’ in a publicly announced thesis that ‘‘medical care is the prerogative of the Federal Government.’’ The business-doctor not only attacks the ‘‘rebels’’ but directs his fire against those funds and foundations, such as the Milbank Fund, that have dared to propose more governmental interest in medicine and against those Federal agencies which have listened interestedly to the proposals of the ‘‘rebels.’’
7 What is the method of functioning of the Foundations approved by Fincap and his
‘‘Doc’’? If Mr. Link or Mr. Pink, for instance, is prevailed upon to make a donation to a
medical foundation of the kind approved by the ‘‘boys,’’ he is in a better position to be
granted
an exploiting franchise by the ‘‘committee’’ in control patents, thus exploiting, directly
under hypocritical benevolence, man’s physical vulnerability.
8 On the front page of the N. Y. Sunday Times, February 28, ‘38, in columns 1 and 2 there appeared two extraordinarily pertinent articles:
9 Column 1: ‘‘TAX CUT SENTIMENT TO HELP BUSINESS RISES IN SENATE’’—enough said.
10 Column 2: ‘‘WIDER HEALTH AID FOR NATION URGED. THE COST OF ILLNESS AND PREMATURE DEATHS IS ESTIMATED AT $10,000,000,000 ANNUALLY,’’ a report by the Technical Committee for Medical Care of the U. S. Public Health Service. Consider these items:
1112Mortality of mothers during child birth:
13Mortality of infants during second to twelfth month of life:
14Appropriate treatment of children with rheumatic heart disease:
15Pneumonia typing and sera effective if applied:
16Mortality of tuberculosis can be reduced:
17 Disability from malaria:
18 New cases of syphilis annually:
19 The Committee declared that:
2021As a nation we are doing vastly less to prevent suffering and to conserve health and vitality than we know how to do through tried and tested methods…Sanitary advance owes much to epidemics or threats of their approach, to outbreaks of contagious disease among school children, to floods and other disasters of the past; but we cannot permit the future of health services to continue to rest with the accidents of history. The systematic warfare against disease on a broad front is long overdue.
22 V2 to 7> avoidable.
23 V2 avoidable.
24 will restore 7s to normal life.
25 44 states have no pneumonia control program.
26 50% by health supervision of workers in occupations predisposing to disease.
27 excessive in the rural south.
28 518,000. Awful toll reducible by 95% under program of control.
29 More than 1,100,000 births are occurring in families which are on reliefer have total incomes including home produce on farms of less than $1000 a year.
30 The poor of our large cities experience sickness and mortality rates as high today as were the gross rates of fifty years ago.
31 Why not be even ‘‘mechanistically’’ intelligent (to say naught of the abstract, mystic and harmonic riches to accrue) and cut the gross costs of the body politic thus reducing ‘‘unseen’’ expenditures and automatically reducing necessary taxation income to government for inefficiency-outgo. The ‘‘practical’’ man’s way of paring expenses has too long dominated politics.
32 Granting that there is certain logic in the saying that a ‘‘stitch in time saves nine,’’ or ‘‘an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure,’’ we may discover that if there were any pro-social integrity in the guiding philosophy of the Rockefeller Foundation to advance the well being of man, it would surely long ago have underwritten scientific re-pro-shelter. The Foundations trustees and executives have been legally helpless to become actively interested in such development because the ‘‘deed of trust’’ (‘‘deed’’ is first cousin to ‘‘dead’’) specifies curative medicine, not mechanically aseptic prevention. They are financed to look for a filterable virus, but have no wherewithal to place the filter at the entrance portal of the home.
33 There are, of course, certain virtues in ‘‘individualization’’ in the advance research field and always will be. It is self-evidently impossible to consider the overnight socialization of an antidote which, although found by test to be effective, lacks a practical means of production. Granted, for instance, the theoretical possibility that Rockefeller Institute’s cancer researchers may have developed a serum and procedure with every indication of effectively curing cancer, and that the ‘‘serum’’ evolved is the result of a long series of apparently accidental biological transactions complicated to such a degree that it is impossible to obtain it in more than intermittent and minute quantities, it would surely be socially catastrophic for the Rockefeller Institute to announce its success in curing one or several cases of cancer. The myriad of victims of cancer would futilely inundate the premises to the devastating detriment of progress toward the ultimate broad victory. Long years of pioneering and individual sacrifice would still be required for the development of adequate quantities of such a product. Might represented by unlimited funds and the mightiest of armies could be of no avail in the acceleration of such an event.
34 IF (cliched ‘‘the biggest word in the language’’ because it cannot be hurdled) Fincap had accredited the inventions and processes to be utilized in vital abstract monopolies (radio-aviation, etcetera) not only at the time of their first demonstration (which he did not) but more pertinently at the time of the rational citation of the various inventors of their earnestly proposed developments, then it could be said truthfully that Fincap was motivated by longing in so doing because longing wishes to include for another or others ever more embracing and refining harmonious means and processes. However, this has never happened, for whenever the inventors of these instruments and processes have invited Fincap’s backing (by Fincap we mean the formal banking world, not foresighted exceptional individuals), they failed utterly to win such support at the crucial time of invention.
35 Fincap was and is not longing-inspired. He entered the fields of aeronautics, radio, advance medicine and publishing (the first two highly abstract, the latter relatively so) only after hundreds of men had given their lives for the practical establishment in the popular mind of ‘‘credit’’ in the performance of these mechanisms and their use processes. When Fincap did invest, finally, in these activities, he did so with his usual scheming, law-evolved, bully-imposed legislative franchise monopoly ‘‘set up.’’
36 Prior to Fincaps advance into such monopoly of the abstract fields in America, he continued to weave, fearfully and cunningly, about these ‘‘fields’’ lines of legal argument anent ‘‘constitutional interpretation’’ and, in England, about ‘‘precedent,’’ with oftrepeated references to the ‘‘spirit’’ of the ‘‘people,’’ et cetera. Under the cloak of slippery hoodwinking and only when the new pastures had been walled offby his lawyer-raiding army, Fincap mounted his abstract-legalized-monopoly steed and ventured timidly, but quite safely, into the new grazing fields. Once inside, Fincap was reluctant for a time to ride about because he was afraid he might break off his steed’s dummy legs. These ridiculous abstract-monopoly steeds, guided by frightened (because abstract-blind) poltroonish riders who quivered inside their chrome-nickel-steel armor, nibbled around front lawns, and fearfully and jealously listened to the browse-wandering of other Fincaps’ steeds in the same fields. But Old Man ‘‘Evolution’’ has no time for such mummery.
37 Wild, winged horses are constantly being born outside the walls to be ridden bare back by a roving band of pioneering minds. Eventually this herd will agglomerate into so large a mobile horde as successfully to stampede the monopoly plain, as have mobile hordes through all times. The legs of the wild horses are not fictional and created to fool the riders into believing they are legs. They are ‘‘the real thing.’’
38 Prior to the World War, many individuals broke their necks in aeroplanes and thousands of boys for years spent their allowances in evolutions of the primitive wireless. These experimenters (or ‘‘nuts’’) received no support from Fincap, that is, not directly. Indirectly the ‘‘wireless’’ and ‘‘roadless’’ received developmental backing through military departments of government which, in time of peace, will fear-accord vast sums for the development of the scientifically indicated defensive appurtenances of a theoretical and always potential ‘‘NEXT’’ war.
39 Radio, particularly for naval communications, and aeroplanes for both navy and army tactics had been developed to primary workability in the pre-1914 period. Fincap, however, from a direct profitable peace time employment viewpoint, laughingly dismissed them as mechanisms of a remote future—say, some thousand to five thousand years hence. H. G. Wells’s ‘‘War in the Air’’ was viewed as an ‘‘Uncle Lubin’’ visiting the moon. Fincap was utterly blind to the industrial significance of these two activities for he was still interested solely in TANGIBLE monopolies and the TANGIBLE linkage of monopolies. He could conceive of no way to monopolize wire-less and trackless communication and transportation. Moreover, these were dangerous activities to develop. They MIGHT prove to be the means of people’s escape from the web of tangible monopoly.
40 Eventually, however, fear necessitated Fincap’s recognition and support of the Navy and Army’s defensive inclusion of wireless and aeronautics. The monopolists for all time had been articulating this fear in the theory of necessity to sovereign governments of military weapons as a constant safety factor, not only for the protection of their skins but, also, as an assured outlet for certain products in peace as well as in war, at gratifyingly high profits. Even as military exploitation possibilities, however ephemeral, aeronautics and radio could not be conceived of by them as involving any ‘‘tonnage’’ of raws.
41 As a result of the behind the scenes battles between individual inventors ambitious of usurping the military defense patronage of wireless and aeronautics prior to the War, unique and divergent design developments occurred respectively within each of the sovereign entity camps. When the World War threw these mechanisms into an almost universal competition and mortal combat, their human operatives appraised and integrated, with an alacrity born of mortal necessity, the individual unique developments, not only in all of the allied camps but in the enemy camps as well, through the capture of enemy mechanisms. Thus an accelerated and integrated progression of aeronautical and wireless development occurred.
42 The great armies of scientifically minded young people who had longed for this-and-that new accessory of their radio and aeronautic mechanisms without hope of being able to afford it, and in the terms of the operation of which they dreamed without hope of gratification, were immediately and suddenly empowered by war credits to ‘‘shoot the works.’’
43 Struggling designers, builders and fliers of the early planes became men of marked importance backed both with the best of media, and almost unlimited credit. In the army and navy, those assigned to aeronautical duty, whether in the fighting zone or not, were paid double the amount paid others of their specific rank. A special enlisted-man rating was evolved in the U. S. N. for aeronautical mechanics. This rating was ‘‘Chief Special Mechanic’’ and called for more dollars than were paid to the ground officers immediately in command of these mechanics. However, this is not surprising; they were worth a hundredfold this bonus.
44 Special ratings were evolved, also, for the mechanical developers of radio in the navy. As the immediate hazard to life, so dramatically inherent in aeronautics and submarine service, was not apparent in the radio field, the radio operators received no bonus in excess of that given for service in war zones to those of any rate or rank. Consequently, no man of radio developmental ability could be induced into the ‘‘service’’ except by draft, and by the time the drafting idea matured those distinguished by their developmental ability in the art of radio communication had already become employed as ‘‘exempt’’ civilian technicians in the army and navy departments.
45 At the beginning of the War in 1914, and, indeed, in 1917 when the United States entered the arena, radio was still in the infancy age of distance-limited ‘‘spark’’ sets. It was the long distance, gargantuan high seas troop and supply transportation, opposed tactically by the all-seas passaging submarines, that invoked the necessity of radio communication ‘‘extraordinary.’’
46 Important distance refinement occurred with the inception of ‘‘arc’’ sets. First accomplished experimentally in 1901 it became economic to telegraph across the Atlantic. ‘‘Arc’’ was employed, however, primarily in large land stations such as at Arlington, Washington, D. C., Bar Harbor, and aboard first class men o’war and large transports. Smaller craft, destroyers, et cetera, continued to work on the old spark sets. The operators were nicknamed ‘‘Sparks.’’
47 Although radio telephony had been invented prior to 1917 (1902) and experimental-stage-mechanisms had been placed aboard battleships, destroyers and ships down to submarine size for use in close fleet formation manoeuvers, anticipatory to major naval engagements such as occurred between Germany and England at Jutland, these experimental devices were so poor that throughout the next two years (until the Armistice) they were retained merely as mural decorations in conning towers of ships. When they did work, their usefulness was limited to horizon distances, for which visual communication, systems of blinker, wig-wag and semaphore were more useful and familiar.
48 Meanwhile, civilian experts like Dr. Lee De Forest continue! their efforts in the development of their arts. Dr. De Forest succeeded in devising a radio set so light and able that it could be used in an aeroplane for communicating with others on land and sea. By the end of 1917 he actually succeeded in establishing communication by voice between an aeroplane and a vessel. His important tube invention, isolating regenerative elements in vacuum, foretold the opening of a new era in communication, all radio work thitherto having been exposed to the vagaries of the chemical chaos of environmental gases.
49 When the Armistice was declared, President Wilson, professoridealist, decided to attend the peace conference in an endeavor to establish a League of Nations that would prevent recurrence of world-warring. The intimate picture of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of world-warring, necessarily revealed to the President of the United States, must have been God-awful. The S/S George Washington, a by-America-seized German ship converted into a troop transport, was selected as the ship for the Presidential passage to the peace conference. Congress granted a special appropriation to the Navy Department for equipping this transport in the most able manner for the presidential-entourage crossing.
50 Wilson’s administrative activities, which had amplified an hundredfold over those of any previous President, involved a constant necessity of most able communication. Therefore, all necessary funds were available to radio experts to evolve for the George Washington the most extraordinary radio equipment that had ever been put into marine use.
51 Radio telephony, which theretofore had been used only in the spark field, was extended to the long distance and high powered arc field. Thrilling new distance operations occurred in the radio shack atop the ship. In the few months between the President’s first trip to Europe and his second trip, arc telephony was so improved that by the time of the second trip human voices conversed across the Atlantic (from Brest Harbor to Arlington) for the first time in history.
52 War ended, Fincap became very busy recapturing, through his legally established power-over-government, his ‘‘inalienable divine property rights’’ which had, for efficiency, gone under government control for the ‘‘duration’’ of the War.
53 The widely convincing, peace-time clamoring of business bullies in the press that a free business reign is far more efficient than so-called government ‘‘bureaucracy’’ is quickly forgotten by the business man when the emergency of war arises. During war, however, not only the efficiency but the mortally-inevitable only-possible-chance-of survival is seen, with the brilliant clarity of lightning, to inhere in complete governmental mandate over all of man’s activities. It is simple: Men freed of money-accounted cost and initiative-crushing by Fincap and his chiselling cohorts, cooperate efficiently in war for survival purposes.
54 The railroad slump caused specifically by the automobile and truck mileage ascendency which outdistanced the r. r. in 1918 thereafter to take away the profitable bulk of transportation, occurring by coincidence in the same year that the r. r. were turned back by the government to Fincap, was seized upon by the latter as his outstanding argument—‘‘proof positive’’ that the government is woefully inefficient as a manager of industry. While Fincap’s conclusion may be right in certain categories his trump card as played was a joke.
55 During the War, open-hearted tolerance and consideration of others became universally possible in home fields because people, ‘‘great’’ or unknown, rich and poor, and with all manner of habitual special interests, were freed, for the nonce, from business’s ‘‘class’’ requirements and activities. Business’s greater preoccupation was in vast war profits, whose frequency precluded time for ‘‘penny pinching,’’ whereas the preceding era of peace business, in its activity in the HOME field, imposed on the populace the necessity of a YOU or ME survival, egocentricity, and intolerance. The open-hearted, open-minded inclusion of the welfare of even the most remote stranger, which became rampant and harmoniously active during the War, persisted in festivals of reunion and in memorials-ofindividuals and common grief during the whole of two years after the Armistice, that is, so long as the homing movement of integration lasted. Today, excepting an annual mass Legionnaire or other convention, it is all but forgotten. The dreary existence of disabled veterans in ‘‘HOMES’’ is nauseating.
56 While the reunion was going on Fincap had ample opportunity--that is, he was free of penetrating public scrutiny—to carry out the legal capture or recapture of every possible profitable mechanism, method, process and organization developed by the War.
57 Great abstract services like transportation, communication and information diffusion, coordinated during the War under strict governmental supervision, were withdrawn from that control, not as the simple specific plant, structure or system originally taken over by the government, but as tremendously advanced, efficient mechanisms, in many cases completely re-instrumented. Ships were turned back to original or new owners with completely new power and communication mechanisms, et cetera. In each major category, however, the directionary control had gone scientific by abstractmind interpolation.
58 The rugged individuals in their chrome-nickel-steel armor, on stuffed horses, set about ‘‘audaciously’’ once more to carry the ‘‘banner of progress.’’ Finding, however, that their War baptized monopoly babies had grown up somewhat and had gone abstract, ‘‘fixing’’ nitrogen from the air, et cetera, they had need to employ ‘‘trouble shooters,’’ semi-technical liaison men between themselves and the scientific leadership intent on progressive deflating of the latter.
59 Their idea was to get people and industry down to business.
60 Those that they brought down died of the shots or had their wings clipped never to fly again but the main flight soared away unscathed. Tantalized by the flying and counseled by the trouble shooters, business decided to revamp its tactics of capture.