Indianapolis Times, Indianapolis, Marion County, 19 May 1939 — Page 18

Vagabond From Indiana==Ernie Pyle

Admires Japan's Million - Dollar Temple at the Fair, but It's Those Indo-Chinese Gals That Floor Him.

(Third of a Series)

SAN FRANCISCO, May 19.—This western World Fair is a Pageant of the Pacific. Grouped around the shores of an immense lagoon in the middle of the man-made Treasure Island are the exhibit buildings of the

nations that rim the Pacific. You can start with Canada, go down the coast to Panama ana on down to Tierra del Fuego, jump across to New Zealand and Australia, work your way up through the Philippines and Java and the Malay States, and come along toward IndoChina and Japan. And in the center of this manyacred replica of half the world is a place called Pacific House, which ties them all together. In it are marvelous mural-maps by Covarrubias. 4nd in the center a huge relief map of the Pacific, so real it actually has water in it. It would be foolish and impossible for me to try to describe these foreign exhibits. Some are magnificent; some are bad. If I had to do i over, I would spend most of my time in the Pacific and California buildings. In some vou could drop dead and there wouldn't be anybody around to find you for an hour or so. Because nothing is happening there; they haven't made it entertaining. vet little Guatemala and little ®l Salvador—why, vou can't even edge your way into their small buildings. Why? Because they've got marimba bands playing, and the players are dressed in native costume, and they plav loud and vigorously Japan has a wonderful exhibit. It is a milliondollar temple, winding three-sidedly around a lagoon, with arched bridges and blossoms and girls and everything. The Nippon exhibit designed to win back Amerfcan sympathy, consists of beautiful and rare works of art; of Japanese silkmaking; of flowers and umbrellas: of futuristic-looking photos showing how modern Japan is (for which she gives credit to American science); of Japanese tea gardens where you sit and sip tea and look out over a little lake just as in Japan. It's idyllic. Mighty smart—these Japanese.

Chinatown te the Rescue China does not have an exhibit in the Pacific Court. China is too poor, fighting Japan. So the | businessmen of San Francisco's Chinatown set up what they call the Chinese Village in the Gayway section. It would take you a couple of hours to do it. Somehow, it doesn't seem to me to express China at all They do give shows, and have marvelous acrobats, and dragon dances through the “village” streets. The three that really got hold of me were the exhibits of the Dutch East Indies, of French Indo-China, and of the Philippines. In the East Indies building there are dark, intricate carvings in wood that make my mouth water the way roast turkey does a fat man’s. There are native girls making batik The man over at the Indo-China exhibit has got me itching to go to Indo-China. He is head of the tourist bureau in Saigon, and says to look him up if I ever come over, ! The girl hostesses are also from Indo-China. | They'll go back as soon as the Fair is over. (I'll be | right there waiting at the dock; you should see them.) | The Philippines exhibit is immense. The interior | { i

Mr. Pyle

is practically all bamboo, and there are variety and | imagination in the layouts. There are whole rooms of bamboo furniture, and beautiful wood carvings, and | dainty things of mother-of-pearl, and of course a | photo of that old Igorote, Paul McNutt. | The Argentine building has gauchos, and the Brazil | building has coffee, and New Zealand has wallabies, | and oh, heck with it. Let's get on a Clipper and go to Indo-China

My Day

By Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt

Drive Along Potomac With F. D. R. Makes Her Homesick for Hyde Park.

JASHINGTON, Thursday. —The President and I drove out last evening to a house on the other | side of the Potomac River which has a most lovely view It made me rather homesick as we drove | through the woods and looked out at the river and | saw all the flowers in bloom around the house. I realized how much we were missing of the beauties of the country along the Hudson River, When we returned to the White House, Admiral Melintire walked in and told us that Franklin Jr. had made a successful speech at the dinner which they | both attended. A message from my husband's mother asked that we call her up this morning before 9:30 | o'clock. I was up this morning and waited until about 9:20, and then went in to make the call where the President could talk to her also. I suddenly realized | that probably she would be out, for New York is on | daylight time! Luckily she was still at home and we had a chat about all the various arrangements for the | next few weeks. She wanted to know just what we | were going to do and if there was any chance of my husband coming up to the country any of the coming week -ends. | The uncertainty of anyone in public life makes it | rather difficut to be definite. All I can get, even on | a possible trip to the San Franeisco fair, is that: “1 | may be able to tell you a week before we leave” So | my poor mother-in-law received rather indefinite | decisions also,

Time to Solve Our Problems

As I read the newspapers these davs, T am impressed by the interest we are taking in every move made in Canada by the King and Queen. Outside of this, it seems to me that foreign news | is becoming much less tense and so we can turn to domestic issues, I wonder more and more if it is not vital that the people of this country demand that some of our difficult problems be faced and dealt with? Putting these solutions off and going on the assumption that when things are difficult it is best to wait to see whether time will solve them for us, reminds me of a young man who once told me that he never answered any letters because if he Sle long enough they so often answered themselves, { The big thing before us in this country today is to prove that a Government run by the people can meet and solve its problems. The philotophy back of some other forms of Government is strengthened | day by day when the people of this country do not take aggressive action and wait to see if time will help | them to solve the difficulties which are unpleasant to | face.

Day-by-Day Science

Re Sctence Service { OU don't inherit mental disease as you do the | color of your eyes or hair, But for all that, mental ills do “run in families” The discovery of this | seeming contradiction is reported by a trio of exrarts | on the statistics of mental disease, Drs. Hor«uo M. | Pollock, Benjamin Malzberg and Raymond G. Fuller, in a new book “Hereditary and Environmental Factors in the Causation of Manic-Depressive Psychoses and Dementia Praecox.” (State Hospitals Press) Studying all the available relatives of mental | disease patients—sisters and brothers, uncles, aunts, | parents and grandparents—these scientists found no | evidence of any exact theory of inheritance that would fit the facts. Certainly it is no clear-cut cass of | Mendelian inheritance. A mentally diseased father or mother cannot hand on this trait as eve color is handed on. But, equally certainly, mental disease occurs among | the relatives of mental patients more often than it | oceurs in the general population. Perhaps what is inherited is a predisposition toward mental breakdown — a sort of constitutional weakness that makes a person succumb to straing that another could withstand,

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By Lowell B. Nussbaum » E won't have a satisfactory social situation in this country until business becomes democratic—an industry of the worker, by the worker and for the worker.” Thus, William P. Hapgood sums

up the philosophy that is the key to the now famous Indianapolis experiment in human relations, the Columbia Conserve experiment in which the workers them-

| selves are the stockholders.

It is the plant where the works ers hire and fire their leaders In this unique factory, the workers fix their own salaries on the basis of their personal needs, guarantee themselves 52 weeks’ pay a year, with full pay during illness and a pension when they no longer can work Thev receive medical, dental and hospital care for themselves and their families and never see a bill for these services The experiment, they say, is not an attempt to introduce socialism in industry. Rather, they see it as the frontier post of industrial democracy, the application of political democracy to all industry. “I'm not simple-minded enough,” Mr. Hapgood says, “to think Henry Ford could turn over his vast business to his army of workers to run without first training them for leadership. “He and his workers would have to spend years educating the workers the fundamentals of how to manage it without wrecking it.” o " ” ACK in 1917, Mr. Hapgood and his brothers—Hutchins, radical writer, and the late Norman, famous editor-—inherited control of the Columbia Conserve Co. from their father, Charles Hapgood. From the time the plant was started in 1903, William Hapgood had been in charge of the canning factory, “not by superior ability necessarily, but by property rights, since my family owned the entire stock of the company.” For years, he had debated with friends and his brothers the social wisdom of resting the control of industry on ownership, and what would happen if the workers controlled industry. So. in 191%, he won his broth« ers’ permission to trv the experi ment. It was started gradually. At first, the workers were merely “eut In” on the profits At the same time, there be-

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1. On this bulletin board, Columbia Conserve Co. workers keep track of their company’s financial affairs. Howard Herner, treasurer, points to an important item. 9. Leo Zike, chef, testis a new recipe. 3. On Friday afternoons, these workers, shown at the soup cauldrons, attend council meetings and decide salaries and other details of the business. 4. Some of Columbia's food products are cooked in the cans in these steam cookers.

gan a campaign of education, with the workers being urged to take more and more of a hand in operating the business By 1025, the plan had succeedwell that a contract was made with the workers as a group for the purchase of the plant by retirement of the common stock from profits. The workers now own 63 per cent of the steck Under that contract, no individual worker owns a single share of stock—the stock is held for them all collectively by frustees they have named Mr. Hapgood, because he knew the business, remained as general manager. Bach year he is reelected general manager by the workers’ council which was set up under the contract.

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HE management of the company is cempletely centered

in this council, composed of all the regular workers Mr. Hapgood, in the dual role of gereral manager and worker,

attends the meetings and reports on his end of the business. Maybe his argument may carry more weight than that of some other worker because of his greater business experience, but when a vote is taken, the general manager's one vote counts for no more than that of the janitor, or the man who mixes the soups. The salaries the workers pay themselves are quite a bit higher than the average in the industry, but they are variable, being raised or lowered by the council as the company's earnings go up or aown. Right wow, conditions in the in dustry are not at their best, so the workers have cut their salaries to 75 per cent of their basic pay. When the depression was at its worst, they allowed themselves only 25 per cent of the base. These salary cuts might not be necessary in the ordinary factory,

FRIDAY, MAY 19, 1939

F

Worker-Ownership at Work

Famed Columbia Conserve Experiment a Success, W. P. Hapgood Says

Entered as Second-Class Matter Indianapolis,

at Postoffice,

where a part of the help is laid off when business is slack. But at Columbia, the idea is to banish the unemployment problem for the workers, so they vote themselves pay cuts and keep everyone on the payroll, os ” ” HEN it came to fixing these basic salaries, the workers’ council spent months making a study. Finally it was decided an unmarried man or woman could live comfortably on $22 a week. There was the starting point But they felt a married man needed more, so they added 50 per cent, bringing his salary to 833 It takes money to rear children, so they allowed $2 extra for each child under the age of 16, but they limit the allowance for children to three. Carrying out its policy of pave ing according to need, the council recognises that some of its members have special problems. Perhaps a worker's wife is an invalid and he has to hire someone to help her with the work at home. Or maybe he has to support his parents. In such cases, he can go to the council's special needs committee and present his facts. If his request is justified, he is given an extra allowance. Most of the foremen and other leaders receive the same pay they got before they were promoted, The council goes on the theory that a boss eats no more, needs no more clothing merely because his talent lies in the line of di recting rather than being di« rected. ® #0» HUS, some of the unmarried leaders (they don't call them bosses at Columbia) draw iess pay than some of the workers under them. A few of the leaders much higher salaries, For instance, Mr. Hapgood's basic salary as general manager is $100, the same salary he received before he turned the plant over to the workers. However, like the rest, he is taking a pay cut now, receiving $75.

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TEST YOUR KNOWLEDGE

1-<What is archeology? 2<With which major league baseball club does Bob Feller play? 3—<In what relative positions should the engagement and wedding rings be worn? 4—-Name the Minister of Fore eign Affairs for Jugoslavia. 5-~What is the horizon? 6-Under what river is the Hol land Vehicular Tunnel? 7—What is the correct pronunciation of the word dis course? » ” »

Answers

1--The science of antiquities. 2-<The Cleveland Indians. 3-<Both should be worn on the third finger of the left hand, with the wedding ring below. d-~Alexander Cin car-Marko-wich, 5<<The apparent circle around which the sky and earth seem to meet, 6-Hudson River. T-<Dis<kors’; not dis'-kors. ” - .

ASK THE TIMES

Inclose a 3-cent stamp for reply when addressing any ques= tion of fact or information to The Indianapolis Times Washington Service Bureau, 1013 13th St, N. W, Washington, D. C. Legal and medical advice cannot be given nor can extended be undertaken,

The salary

purchasing agent's basic is $55, while that of the heads of the order department and the accounting department is $47. The number of workers varies, At present there are 69, Besides this group, there are eight wage workers (temporary employees) in the plant and three on the sales force, Wage workers are hired when extra help is needed, and most of them are dis missed when the rush is over. A few become salaried workers. However, before a wage worker goes on salary and becomes an owner, he is tested thoroughly. First there is a rigid medical examination. Then an intelligence test to see if he is qualified to share in the responsibilities of leadership. One of the prime requisites is an inclination to work. Another requisite an ability to get along with the group as a whole. Troublemakers, gossips and grumblers are not tol erated. If their leaders can't straighten them out, a committee tries, and if it too fails, the council decides what to do. Although the council sets no definite standard of efficiency, rating effort higher than results, an efficiency engineer a few years ago found the plant's efficiency unusually high, Maybe the answer lies in the comment of an elderly. worker who loads cans on a conveyor belt: “When we're busy around here, no one pays any attention to the quitting whistle; we just go on until we're done. Why shouldn't we? It's our factory.” Each worker is required to have at least $1000 life insurance, and the plant pays hall the premium. Lunches are furnished free in the plant's cafeteria. Columbia's biggest problem is marketing its product. It learned long ago the difficulty of market ing its soups and other canned goods under its own label, so most of the goods it packs are sold under the private labels of wholesal«

is

ers and consumer co-operatives.

More than 80 per cent of the soup sold in the U. S., Mr. Hap~good says, is sold by one company. “Several companies have spent millions in advertising trying to hreak into that market, without success. We can't afford that. So we pack under our customers’ labels, and naturally the custom=ers try to push the goods with their own labels.” The worker-owners at Colum=bia are watching closely the growth of the consumer co-opera-tive movement, with the expectation that eventually this movement will provide the solution to their sales problem. ” n »

“gT appeals to our intellect to work together collectively for the common good,” he explains. “Ours is a laboratory to see if a group of workers can successfully

manage their own business.” Two years ago the company made a net profit of $48,998. Last year it lost—$16,918—but so did a lot of other factories. Looking back over the years, Mr, Hapgood feels that, on the whole, the experiment has been a success. But whether industrial democracy as practiced at Columbia ever will become universal—that's another question. Conservative businessmen who have studied the experiment are skeptical. Some of Columbia's competitors concede, privately, that its work-er-owners turn out good products and that the work at the plant seems to be handled efficiently. But they question that the plan would work in a larger plant. “Theoretically, it's a very fine idea,” said one businessman in an allied industry, “and it probably will work out all right as long as one man dominates it. “But what's going to happen when Mr. Hapgood retires and they haven't anyone with his rare combination of business experience and social theories to take his place?” That is what a lot of others, including Columbia's 69 owners, wonder themselves.

Everyday Movies—By Wortman

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PAGE 19

Ind.

Qur Town

By Anton Scherrer

Old Commercial Club Such a Good Place to Eat It Ended Habit of Merchants Going Home for Lunch.

ANOTHER mighty good eating place back in the Nineties was the restaurant on the upper floor of the old Commercial Club, the one they tore down to make room for

Ayres’ Annex. It had a tough time getting started, however, There were several reasons. First of all, there was the lack of patronage. When the restaurant started in 1891, most men in Indianapolis took off a

couple of hours every noon, walked all the way home, leisurely ate their dinner and laid down for a cat-nap before returning to work. It “took practically 10 years to break Indianapolis businessmen of the habit, and I guess the Commercial Club contributed as much as anything to the new order. Anyway, the new restaurant didn’t get going good until sometime, around 1899. Before that, however, there were other vexatious problems to overcome. One of the most important was to find a suit« able manager. Several had been uried, but did not seem to fill the bill. At any rate, not sufficiently to suit the club's fastidious secretary, a conscientious Yale graduate, who was out to make a name for him= self. He wanted to get the best man for the place, and spent a good part of his time writing letters hoping, somehow, that somebody satisfactory would turn up. Nobody did, however. One day, a member of the Commercial Club happened to be loafing around the secretary's office, and casually remarked that he was about to make a business trip East. Immediately, the secretary saw things coming his way and took advantage of it, He asked the traveler to keep his eyes open, and if by any chance he ran across a good manager for the Commercial Club restaurant, for goodness’ sake, get his name and address.

Always a First Time

And sure enough, when the traveler got back, he reported that he saw a man in Philadelphia who he thought would make an excellent manager if it was possible to get him to come out West. The man’s name was Boldt—George B., he thought. The secretary expressed his thanks and right away sat down to write Mr. Boldt a letter, in the course of which he said that the Commercial Club restaurant was growing in popularity every day and if the right person pushed the business hie might feed 50 people every noon at 30 cents apiece. That same week the secretary received a very polite letter from Mr. Boldt. It was written on note paper of the Waldorf-Astoria and assured the Commercial Club that he appreciated having his name considered in connection with the management of their restaurant. Inasmuch, however; as he had his hands full running the Waldorf-Astoria in New York and the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia, he couldn't see how he could consider the matter at the present time, It then dawned on the secretary that some smart aleck had made him the victim of a ghastly joke, Some time later that same year, the secretary happened to be in New York. and at the Waldorf some= body introduced him to Mr. Boldt. Soon as Mr, Boldt heard the name, he recognized it immediately, doubled up with laughter and invited the secretary of the Indianapolis Commercial Club to sit down and have a good dinner, one that cost every bit of 30 cents. You'd recognize the secretary's name, too. It was Evans Woollen. As far as I knew, it's the only time anybody ever fooled Mr. Woollen.

Jane Jordan—

Lonely Wife Urged to Interest Husband in Home of Their Own.

EAR JANE JORDAN-—I will have been married a year June 1st. My husband is 32 and I am 21, I expect to become a mother in December. My hus band seems awfully glad about it, but he likes to play poker and stays in the poolroom all of the time he isn’t working. Don't you think he should be more con=

siderate of me? We live with his sisters and he hardly ever gives

me any money. Never more than a dollar every two or three weeks. You may tell me to go out and make girl friends but I have no money tc spend foolishly, I married my husband because I love him and want his company. When I ask him if he loves me all he can say is that he wouldn't have married me if he didn't. We hardly ever argue except about his leaving me alone so much. If I say anything about it he says he is a model husband and never gives me a cross word. He never takes me anywhere. He thinks as long as I have his sisters to go with I shouldn't need him. Please give me some solution to this as it means so much to me, LONESOME.

Mr. Scherrer

" » n

Answer—Probably the best thing you can do is to ston arguing with him about his leaving you alone and attack your problem from some other angle. In mort cases women are obliged to get their way through indirection. For example why don't you interest him in getting a home of his own? At first the expense may prove a discouraging factor, but you can set it as a goal toward which you both may work. Now that you're going to have a child you have more reason than ever to live alone. The mistake you made was in starting your mare ried life with your husband's sisters. In moving in with his family you made it easy for him to continue his bachelor habits of stepping out whenever he felt like it. Nothing occurred to change the routine of his life. The only difference is that he added another woman to come home to, and he is surprised that she makes more demands on his time than his sisters did. A home of his own would hold more interest for He wouldn't have anyone to leave you and the baby with. It wouldn't be so easy for him to shift part of his responsibilities to others. He'd have to shoulder them himself. It may take some time to accomplish this, but I see no other way out. To nag a man for his established habits only arouses his resistance against changing them. In some way you have to make a change more attractive.

Note to Endymion—I devoted a whole column to my opinion of your book of poems shortly after I received it. If you can remember the date of the correspond=ence, I will look it up for you and send it to you. JANE JORDAN.

Put your problems in a letter to Jane Jordan whe will answer your questions in this column daily.

New Books Today

Public Library Presents—

“ O face our future we must understand and evaluate our past. It is essential for us to know how we have become what we are, if we are to deal intelligently with the problem of what we are to be.” In her endeavor to throw a brighter and clearer light on the birth of our United States, Elizabeth Page has chosen to depict in her novel TREE OF LIBERTY (Literary Guild) the families of the Peytons and Humphreys. In particular, she has taken the family of Mathew Howard and Jane Peyton and through them has vivified that period of our history, 1754-1806, during which colonies passed from their colonial traditions, through unrest, revolution, and perilous trials, into a nation. Miss Page says she chose the Jeffersonian Period as the background of her novel because “it held enough that was parallel to our own

time for a study of it to have peculiar value in this perplexed day.” 1

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