CHAPTER IV Robert Owen THE REFORMER

THE LONG annals of money getting have produced but one Robert Owen. If you can imagine one of the largest employers in America—Mr. Henry Ford, for instance—becoming the leader of the labor movement, or Mr. Tom Girdler taking the field for factory reform, or Mr. Owen D. Young going up and down the land clamoring for a recovery scheme not unlike Mr. Upton Sinclair’s EPIC plan; if you will conceive of a manufacturer, whose schooling got no farther than the three R’s, becoming the most advanced educational reformer of his time, using the kindergarten before Pestalozzi or Froebel, antedating Marx in socialism and all the Victorian reformers in welfare work, you will have some idea of the sort of man Robert Owen was in the dawn of the industrial revolution. It was in amassing a fortune as a manufacturer that Owen saw the evils of the factory system flourish, saw challenging human problems flowing out of the same machines that poured out wealth for him and set him off upon his extraordinary career of unselfish evangelism for the creation of a better world.

There have been many men of wealth who have looked with questioning upon their possessions. Andrew Carnegie, as a young man, was deeply disturbed to find he had made fifty thousand dollars in a year and he wrote in a moment of pious possession that he would never permit himself to make more than this. It was a vow as useless as if Casanova had sworn himself to celibacy. Some have soothed themselves amid their treasures by giving after they were done with getting. But Owen, even as a young man, declared war upon the system by which he was growing rich and, in the end, consumed his fortune in that struggle. He organized the first model factory system. He forced the passage of the first Factory Act. He built the first infant school. He pioneered in universal education. He built a utopian community in the New World. And he never ceased his pressure upon the public mind of England. When he was eighty-seven he wrote his autobiography. When he was eighty-eight he was still calling meetings and conferences. He was one of those rare souls who had caught a vision of the future and who kept his eyes all his life upon the far-off hills. Though it was a modest one, no fortune in history has had so profound an effect upon the course of human events.

Brown Brothers

ROBERT OWEN

Owen was born at Newtown, in Montgomeryshire on the Welsh border, on May 14, 1771, the son of the village saddler and iron-monger. He was born into an England that was overwhelmingly agricultural but alive with a score of professional and amateur mechanics and inventors who were tinkering with all sorts of clumsy little machines that would revolutionize the world and its way of life.

He had a business career that satisfied all the specifications of a Samuel Smiles success story. He got no more education than a bright boy under ten could get from a gentleman who apparently knew but little more than his scholars, and who was named Mr. Thickness—a name hardly surpassed by the schoolmaster of Dickens’ Coketown, Mr. Choakumchild.

At nine he was assisting the schoolmaster.

At ten he set out, like Dick Whittington, for London, to seek his fortune, with but forty shillings in his pocket.

In a few months he was apprenticed to a Mr. McGuffog, a draper in Lincolnshire, an excellent and honest merchant who proved a sound exemplar. He attended the Presbyterian Church with Mr. McGuffog and the Church of England with Mrs. McGuffog, generating such a supply of tolerant piety that he was called “the little parson,” but also acquiring a healthy skepticism of the creeds preached by the rival ministers.

At thirteen he was a clerk with Palmer and Flint, a drapery house on London Bridge, working from eight in the morning to midnight and often later. Palmer and Flint were pioneers in their way. They ran an eighteenth-century cash-and-carry store, with fixed prices and moderate markups.

At sixteen young Owen transferred his activities to a wholesale draper in Manchester. This was 1787. From across the Channel came the rumblings of the French Revolution that would stir England and particularly her young thinkers and writers like Southey and Wordsworth. But young Owen would remain untouched by this storm. He was far more interested in another revolution that was now in full swing—the industrial revolution. And Manchester was the scene of some of its most notable victories. In this feverish hive, filled with its new breed of self-made men, its boosters and Babbitts, the young neophyte of business was far more interested in getting along and ahead than in making over the world by such violent means as were being used by the Paris mob. In this year, at eighteen, Owen went into business for himself.

With a hundred pounds borrowed from a brother in London, he formed a partnership with a practical mechanic to manufacture spinning machinery. It ended quickly, Owen taking some of the machines they had made and starting by himself as a spinner. He prospered and was soon making six pounds a week profit. At twenty he answered an advertisement of a Mr. Drinkwater who owned a mill and wanted a new manager. Owen demanded £300 a year and got it. Thus at twenty this budding success-story hero found himself the manager of a plant with 500 hands and a contract for £400 the second year, £500 the third, and a fourth interest after that.

Two years later Drinkwater was negotiating to combine his interests with Samuel Oldknow, a rising cotton lord, and Owen was shouldered out of the promise of a partnership. He quickly formed another partnership with a new concern backed by two substantial Manchester cotton firms. This was the Chorlton Twist Company. Owen found himself building a large mill in the Manchester suburbs that he later operated as managing partner. His duties forced him to travel about, and in these commercial wanderings he met at Glasgow a lady named Anne Caroline Dale. Her father was a banker and manufacturer who had built several cotton mills in Scotland. One he had put up at New Lanark in partnership with Richard Arkwright, famous for having introduced certain important spinning inventions. But Dale and Arkwright had parted company and Dale was looking for a buyer for the New Lanark mills. Owen, with his partners of the Chorlton Twist Company, bought the property for $300,000, payable $15,000 a year. And for good measure Owen married Dale’s daughter. After a brief time he moved to New Lanark where he assumed the complete management of this, one of the largest cotton spinning enterprises in Scotland. This was in 1800. And here he was to round out his fortune, make large profits for his partners, and make the name of New Lanark famous throughout Europe and in industrial history.

But Owen’s social experiments at New Lanark landed him in trouble with his partners. Before he got through he had three sets of them. All feared their investments were being imperiled by reform. The first set rebelled when Owen proposed to use company funds to build a school for the children. Owen dug up a fresh set of partners and bought out the original ones, paying them $420,000 for a plant that had cost them $300,000 and on which they had made five per cent a year and an additional $180,000 in profits.

The next set became alarmed when Owen’s educational ideas clashed with their solid British orthodoxy. Also they saw an opportunity to grab a flourishing enterprise at a bargain price. They dissolved the partnership and demanded a public sale, circulated stories of the mills’ difficulties, and insisted they were not worth forty thousand pounds. But at the auction they bid up to $570,000, whereupon Owen topped them with another $500 and got New Lanark. His third brace of partners comprised some wealthy businessmen with reform ideas, including Jeremy Bentham, the famous utilitarian philosopher, and the well-known Quaker, William Allen.

Then for another twelve years, Owen, with a freer hand, developed this industry until it was certainly the most famous, if not the greatest, in England. In the end—in 1825—his last batch of partners drew away from him, some seeing in his schools “a manufactory of infidels.” His management of New Lanark ceased in 1825. He withdrew his interest altogether in 1828.

Owen became a very rich man. But no satisfactory estimate of his fortune has been found. It was, however, a modest fortune and is important, indeed epochal, not for its size but for the fruits it produced in Owen’s mind, the things it enabled him to do to the very processes by which he got rich, the influence it enabled him to exercise upon the new industrial system in the very years of its birth. He spent it as freely as he made it, and after 1828 he ceased to make any more. It was finally exhausted in his numerous crusades, until at last he was wholly without funds and lived upon a modest allowance of £360 a year from his sons, who managed to disguise it as the fruits of some old investments.

The significance of Owen lies in the fact that he began his career as the industrial revolution appeared in Europe. England was fascinated by her new gadgets. They gave birth to the modern factory. The nation was preoccupied with driving the new machines, multiplying its wealth, perfecting the wealth-making organization and devices. Owen saw that these machines were doing something to the soul of England. He became preoccupied with that phenomenon.

The factory was a new economic weapon of profound importance. It enabled the acquisitive man to do something hitherto but little understood—to share in the fruits of the labor of many persons in the field of production. Hitherto this was possible only in agriculture, in merchandising, in finance. But the industrial producer had until now remained a more or less solitary worker. The Cotton Lord was enabled to do in the field of industrial production what the Land Lord was able to do in the field of commodity production.

The factory was not wholly new. Cephalus employed a hundred and fifty men in his shield factory in Athens. There is a story of John Winchecombe—Jack of Newbury—in Henry VII’s day, the “most considerable wit of fancy or fiction England ever beheld” who kept a hundred looms in his house, each managed by a man and a boy. But these were merely central shops. They were very uncommon and were of little economic importance.

Before this time the method of making cotton cloth was quite primitive. The raw cotton was picked and teased to remove the seeds. Then the fibers were combed out by hand. The next step was to twist these fibers into a thread by means of the old-fashioned spinning wheel that had been brought to England from India in the thirteenth century. The threads were then put upon a loom worked entirely by hand. And all this was done in the home of the weaver. The women and children did the seeding, combing, and spinning. The men managed the loom. The family was an organized industrial producing unit. The town merchant supplied the raw cotton and frequently the patterns for the cloth and bought the finished cloth from the weaver. This was indeed the pattern of all production. And under this old handcraft system it was difficult for anyone to share in the product of the producer.

But a series of inventions began to make its appearance in the eighteenth century. Kay invented the flying shuttle in 1738. Instead of throwing the shuttle by hand between the warp threads, the shuttle was now shot in each direction by a spring released by pulling a cord. Thus one man could do the work of two. In 1765 Hargreaves invented the spinning jenny, called after his wife, whose wheel gave him the idea. It enabled a person turning one wheel to spin eight spools at once. And before long this was eighty. Then came the inventions of Arkwright and Crompton, improving the spinning jenny, and later still the application first of water power and then of steam to the operation of spinning machinery and looms. Eli Whitney eliminated household seeding with his cotton gin and Dr. Edward Cartwright completed the process with his invention of the power loom.

The home was no place for these cumbersome machines. It was immediately obvious that the way to use them with the greatest profit was in clusters under a single roof. They made the factory inevitable.

It was into this rapidly developing industry that was producing its Manchesters and Birminghams and Glasgows that Owen stepped, with no education in economics or the social sciences. But he began to see very quickly that the factory was making deep marks upon the human beings it was using as well as upon those it displaced.

Manufacture of cotton was no longer spread out over many places. It became concentrated in lumps and clusters—in cities. And it grew around cities that had access to water power. It made production swifter a J cheaper, so that England began to supply the world with cotton thread and cloth. It shaped the destiny of England, whose Cotton Lords clamored for more laissez faire, more freedom at home while they fought also for wider markets abroad, markets that England proceeded to acquire by capture and to subject to the most rigid control—an inconsistency extinguished by the wondrous solvent of patriotism.

This manufacture of cotton summoned to the surface very quickly a new breed of gentlemen who knew how to organize and manage and promote and get hold of capital. It augmented heavily the number of rich enterprisers. It reinforced the great middle class. It set up a new equestrian order in Britain. It made a powerful group of Cotton Lords—and later Iron Lords and Railway Lords and other categories of industrial nobles—who challenged the supremacy of the Land Lords. It unloosed a mania for money getting since it supplied a new and potent weapon. The predatory soul spun calculating dreams of wealth such as lit the flames of cupidity in Leonardo da Vinci’s soul when he invented, of all things, a needle-making machine. “Early tomorrow,” he writes, “I shall make the leather belt and proceed to trial. . . . One hundred times in each hour 400 needles will be finished, making 40,000 in an hour and 480,000 in 12 hours. Suppose we say 4,000 which at five elidi per thousand gives 20,000 solidi; 1000 lira per working day, and if one works 20 days in the month, 60,000 ducats the year.”¹

Owen saw all this with dismay and commented on “the love of luxury which had induced its possessors to sacrifice the best feelings of human nature in their accumulation.”

On one hand this industry caused larger streams of money income to flow through the land, producing greater prosperity in good times and deeper distress in hard times. The capitalist found endless avenues for pouring his profits into new investment as fast as he made them. The worker was paid in money wages, and monthly there flowed out into the streams of business numerous rivulets of money purchasing power, so that England found herself wallowing in a new kind of prosperity.

In a generation England had undergone a profound change. In 1775 she was an agricultural country. By the census of 1811 the agricultural population was but a quarter of the whole. The cotton mill had done this.

And what had this done to the workers? They had been congregated into unwholesome clusters, into hot, ill-ventilated mills, where they worked long hours at low wages. They dwelt in foul houses. The mills devoured all the hands they could lay hold of—men, women, children. Money wages rose, but there was more need of them since the worker now produced nothing for himself.

Behold the dreary lot of the factory worker! At five in the morning the clanging of the factory bell drew the long streams of unrested slaves through the dark streets to their brick prisons. At seven there was a half-hour for breakfast—tea or coffee, a little bread, perhaps some oatmeal porridge; a scant mess with the tea bad and the infusion weak. A half-hour at noon for dinner—boiled potatoes in one dish, with melted lard for the poorer workers, butter for the better paid; for the most favored a few pieces of fat bacon over the mess. For the factory worker the roast beef of old England was just a phrase in a song. At seven or eight or nine in the evening the streets were darkened again with the drudges trudging home to tea or maybe a glass of grog. The streets were narrow, dirty, without drainage or scavengers. The houses were poor, usually one room to a family. The slum at its worst had arrived.

Early in the factory era the parish board took to farming out the pauper children. They were called pauper apprentices. These wretched children, toiling for twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours a day, were far worse off than slaves. One observer said the children “lived the life of the machine while working and at other times that of a beast.” Imagine, if you can, the lot of the child of ten who went to work at five in the morning, with only a stop for breakfast and dinner, and quit his machine at seven or later at night, and getting for this brutal grind two shillings, twopence a week.

The discipline was rigid. There were rules and fines for every infraction of them, ranging from one to six shillings; there were fines for leaving an oil can out of place, fines for being found dirty or being found washing, fines for leaving a window open or for spinning with the gaslight on too long in the morning. The Cotton Lord, who bent over his hymnal on the Sabbath and gave three-times-three for the glories of laissez faire, bound his workers in a harness of iron discipline beside which Owen found the life of the American slave one of freedom and ease. The employer, indeed, had now found something better than the slave. The slave must be bought with a capital outlay and supported in all times. The factory worker involved no initial investment so far as his body was concerned and could be laid off when times were hard.

At twenty-nine years of age Owen assumed the direction and part ownership of one of the largest of these modern juggernauts. New Lanark was about thirty miles south of Glasgow on the Falls of the Clyde which furnished its power. It consisted of four huge main buildings of graystone quarried near by, each seven stories high and surrounded by smaller workhouses. The buildings, set in a lovely circle of hills, were themselves gaunt, grim fortresses after the model of the large mills of that day.

Between 1800 and 2000 persons dwelt in the village and an additional five hundred pauper apprentices were housed in a separate building. Owen has described this population when he assumed control: “a collection of the most ignorant and destitute from all parts of Scotland, possessing the moral characteristics of poverty and ignorance . . . much addicted to theft, drunkenness and falsehood.” The housing was bad—one family to a room and no sanitary arrangements—and the streets were narrow and filled with filth. The people hated the mills. There were no public houses, the former owner Dale being a rigid prohibitionist, but there were bootleg joints. Many different churches, each with a different creed, led to no end of hostility between the communicants.

Owen’s first services arose out of the reactions of a generous and just spirit to these bad conditions. Yet bad as it was, New Lanark was one of the better mills, and Owen had seen much of the industry in which he had now been engaged for eleven years. He had not yet formed that social and economic philosophy that later brought him into collision with all the respectable elements in Britain. Generally speaking, he began with the assumption that these men and women and children had rights that employers were cruelly ignoring, and he made up his mind to respect those rights in his own mill. And this led him to that philosophy which characterized the welfare movement of the next hundred years: the spirit of noblesse oblige; the principle that the rich ought to be good to the poor.

In pursuance of this, Owen introduced a series of reforms into New Lanark which made it the first model factory.

At the outset he put an end to the employment of the pauper apprentices. He took in no more and let out those who were there as fast as their indentures expired. He employed no children under ten. He limited hours for all to ten and a half—though he believed they should be less, even eight, he was never able to cut them below ten and a half. He ended the fines and introduced an honor system. He greatly improved the houses and doubled the accommodations per family. He supplied playgrounds. He built two school buildings and gave the children the advantages of the best free education then found in England before they went to the mills, and thereafter provided evening instruction. He arranged for lectures, meetings, dances for the adults and threw open to the people for recreation the woods which the company owned. He provided for medical attendance, established a sick club, a savings bank, and summer courses of study in the open air for all. He made available meetinghouses where men of any denomination might speak, ensuring complete religious freedom in New Lanark. And this made a very dark item in the bill of particulars against him when his battles began.

No one in our day will see anything subversive in all this. Indeed even the more conservative employer provides more than this now. Yet it was the introduction of these reforms over a series of years that brought Owen into conflict with his partners, even those later ones who had joined him because of sympathy with his humanitarian objectives. But no one could question the fruits which appeared at New Lanark. The early, sullen hostility of the people had been broken down, a process that was completed when, in 1806, America put an embargo on raw cotton shipments to England. Owen and his partners decided it was best, rather than pay extortionate prices for speculative cotton, to shut down the mills. But for four months he continued to pay the employees their full wages.

Over 25,000 persons, educators, social workers, manufacturers, parliamentary and county and town committees signed the register book at New Lanark as visitors to inspect these reforms. Owen himself said in 1812 that this same population was “conspicuously honest, industrious, sober and orderly and an idle individual, one in liquor or a thief is scarcely to be seen from the beginning to the end of the year.” And above all—miracle of miracles—the company that sponsored all this was singularly prosperous and those who owned it grew rich from it.

Owen, disturbed by the evidences of inhumanity, cruelty, greed, injustice all about him, was nevertheless not so naïve as to suppose that the ignorant and debased proletarians of his day were capable of forming the better world he began to see beyond the far-off hills. He believed that the world had to be made a better place for men to live in dignity. But he was equally convinced that men had to be made better to participate in the treasures of such a world.

Apparently Owen started out with nothing more than a conviction that all children, as a matter of human justice, should have an opportunity to have an education. But he soon went beyond this and imported into his theory the proposition that this education should be of a very special kind; that, while training the mind for the benefit of the individual, the character should be formed upon a model designed to enable the individual to live in an enlightened society. The formation of character became the cardinal principle. And that, Owen believed, must take the direction of developing the social virtues—the human sympathies, an understanding of the rights of others, a hatred of the antisocial virtues of greed, acquisitiveness, dishonesty, private and public. Owen had long before abandoned any faith in any existing religion. But he held as a utilitarian principle that a cultivated modern society of free men cannot be operated successfully without a highly developed and universally accepted code of social ethics. And what is more, he believed this could be accomplished. His own statement of his educational principle ran as follows:

A man’s character is a product of the circumstances in which he is born, lives and works. Evil conditions breed evil men; good conditions develop good men. Today man is surrounded by conditions which breed selfishness, ignorance, vice, hypocrisy, hatred, war. If a new world is to be born the first thing that must be done is to spread the truth concerning the foundation of character, namely that man’s character is made for him and not by him.

It was to lay the groundwork for this dream of a world of socially educated men and women that he established in 1816 at New Lanark his Institution for the Formation of Character.

The time came when Owen determined to compel his fellow manufacturers to clean house. They cheered heartily his plans to reduce the duties on raw cotton, but they turned a deaf ear to his proposals for humanitarian reform in their plants. Then he decided that the state should compel them to be good. He therefore prepared his famous Factory Act, mild enough as we inspect it now but epochal in that it marked the beginning of the long struggle for justice to workers that is not yet wholly won.

Owen’s act applied to cotton, wool, flax, and silk mills. It limited hours to ten and a half a day, prohibited employment of children under ten, fixed the working hours of children as sometime between five A. M. and seven P.M., Provided for medical attendance in cases of contagious diseases, compelled a half-hour daily instruction period for children in a suitable place, and gave to justices of the peace the right of entry and inspection.

The introduction of this bill into Parliament was the signal for calling into action that intransigent reactionary energy known as the manufacturers’ association. Manufacturers, like other men, are far from monsters and have their share of good and bad citizens. But the manufacturers’ association is one of those ingenious inventions that enables the members to preserve their individual decencies while entrusting the promotion of their baser social elements to another. It was then, as it has generally been, the spirit of aggressive selfishness with its hired philosophers and economists and statisticians and publicity men. It proceeded to fight Owen’s moderate proposals as it has since fought almost every step in civilized industry, even when its individual members were advancing; as it has since fought compensation insurance, child-labor laws, humane restrictions of female employment conditions, collective bargaining, wage and hour standards.

Owen, with his son, toured the mill towns and villages and painted for Parliament a dark picture of their indecencies—children working fifteen hours a day and more, some of them infants as young as four; foremen carrying leather thongs to get out of the young by flogging the compliance they extorted from their elders by means of fines; a fifth of the children in shoe factories crippled or otherwise injured by diseases and other abuses.

But the manufacturers’ association was not idle. It investigated Owen and New Lanark. When he charged them with flogging little children, they replied with the impressive revelation that he permitted dissenting ministers in New Lanark meetinghouses. When he pleaded for a measure of Christian compassion for the poor and downtrodden, they countered with the charge that he was a heretic. They investigated not his business practices but his religious tolerance. They paid the expenses of a minister from New Lanark who testified that he had heard his wife quote what she had heard Owen say in a public speech. As the manufacturers’ association today replies to all charges with the cry of “Communist,” their predecessors in Owen’s day cried “infidel.” But they could not say he would ruin their industry, for, with far more exacting standards in his own mill and against an unrestrained competition, he had made notable profits for himself and his colleagues.

In a noble passage Owen depicted the narrow vision of the men who fought him:

I am well aware, my lord, of the claims which these propositions will at first call forth from the blind avarice of commerce; for commerce, my lord, trains her children to see only the immediate or apparent interest; their ideas are too contracted to carry them beyond the passing week, month or year at the utmost. They have been taught, my lord, to consider it the essence of wisdom to expend millions of capital and years of extraordinary scientific application as well as to sacrifice the health and morals of the great mass of the subjects of a mighty empire that they may uselessly improve the manufacture and increase the demand for pins, needles and threads; that they may have the singular satisfaction, after immense care, labor and anxiety on their own parts to destroy the real wealth and strength of their own country by gradually undermining the morals and physical vigor of its inhabitants for the sole purpose of relieving other nations of their share of this enviable process of pin, needle and thread making.

This from one of England’s foremost thread makers.

Owen put his finger on one of the most amazing stupidities of the industrialists—their failure to see that their workers were also consumers and that while England carried on the mightiest efforts to win markets abroad, she excluded her own workers from the market place for the goods she produced, by giving them low wages and long hours. In our own time it dawned upon our own manufacturers, with the force of a discovery, that men buy nothing while they are at work; that much of their spendings occur in their hours of leisure, and that men with pauper wages who are fatigued beyond endurance by long hours can purchase nothing. Yet in the very struggle over the first Factory Act, a hundred and twenty-four years ago, this enlightened manufacturer warned his colleagues that “no evil ought to be more dreaded by a master manufacturer than low wages and long hours. . . . These [their employees] are in consequence of their numbers the greatest consumers. . . . The real prosperity of any nation at all times may be accurately ascertained by the amount of wages or the extent of comforts which the productive classes can obtain in return for their work.” It has taken a hundred and twenty-four years to make employers see that, and, even yet, only imperfectly.

It would be unfair to say there were no manufacturers who sympathized with Owen. One, Sir Robert Peel the elder, greatest of the cotton lords, was a member of Parliament. He was entrusted with the handling of the bill. But he held conference after conference with his fellow mill men; he yielded on point after point. In the end—in 1819—the bill was passed, but frightfully diluted. It was limited to cotton mills, the hours of work were raised to twelve, the age for children was reduced from ten to nine, no inspection was provided. Owen denounced this compromise and washed his hands of the bill. But it was a beginning and he alone was responsible for what was to be the first step in a long and fruitful struggle for the welfare of the masses.

In June, 1815, the allied armies of Europe crushed Napoleon at Waterloo. But something else came to an end—the war boom in England. England fought Napoleon the way we fought the Kaiser, not only with men, but with guns, munitions, ships, and money loaned to her allies and spent for the most part in England. Birmingham and Manchester and London had boomed like Pittsburgh and Bridgeport and New York. Fortunes were made. But the war was the customer. When the war ended the customer vanished. The boom folded up in 1815 as it did in 1919. Warehouses and shelves were filled with unsalable goods. Mills closed down, or cut their wages and workers. Many were already idle because of the displacement of the hand spinners and the revived Enclosure Acts that drove farmers from their acres. Now the cotton and wool and flax mills poured their thousands into the ranks of the unemployed. The war had made the farmers rich—wool and wheat prices soared. Now they demanded that the government keep these prices up. A law was passed excluding foreign grain unless home-grown grain should rise above eight shillings per quarter.

Discontent flamed up menacingly. Poverty became a scourge. Crimes multiplied. By the middle of 1816 the situation was serious. Then the obvious step was taken. A conference was called—as was done by Mr. Hoover in 1929—of the lords of the realm, the Land Lords and the Cotton Lords. The radicals had a plan—parliamentary reform, ballots for people who cried for bread. The Land Lords had a plan—to raise a fund for charitable distributions. Mr. Owen was asked for his views. He gave them, but they were based upon certain fundamental maladies and disarrangements in the economic system. They were listened to with attention. But the conference ended by naming a committee to raise a fund and to enquire further. The Duke of Kent—Queen Victoria’s father—was the chairman. Owen was made a member. He was asked to prepare a plan. He did. And when he presented his plan at a meeting of the committee presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury it is not difficult to believe that that gentleman and certain others arched their noble and sacerdotal eyebrows. This plan marked the beginning of Owen’s slide into the realm of utopian socialism, and he was proposing it to men who worshiped not a Trinity, but a quadripartite god—The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and Property.

Here was his plan. Society had found a means of producing goods beyond the “revenues” of the people to buy. This disparity between goods produced and available purchasing power seemed to him the hub of the problem. Having more capacity to produce than to buy, manufacturers deemed it necessary to reduce capacity. Capacity consisted of men and machines. But the machines were cheaper than the men, so the men were let out. But the men let out were also consumers. The machines were not. Thus the ability of society to consume was once again diminished more than its capacity to produce.

The men let out became a charge upon the taxpayers, which still further added to the burden of the manufacturer.

Owen then offered a scheme. It will sound strangely familiar to American readers who recall Mr. Upton Sinclair’s EPIC plan that inflamed the imaginations of some Californians and the terrors of others in 1934 to such an extent that Mr. Sinclair was almost elected governor.

Owen proposed first that the poor and unemployed be taken at a stroke off the backs of the taxpayers. This proved as enticing in Britain as it did in California, for the employer, having perched on the backs of the workers, now found that a large number of them in turn had climbed on his back. Owen proposed that the unemployed should be literally lifted out of the normal economic system and placed in a separate one. They would be settled in villages of co-operation. The village would produce what it needed for its subsistence. The villagers would be producers and consumers. Thus what the unemployed produced would not augment the supply of goods offered in the commercial markets. But by producing what they needed they would also supply themselves with purchasing power that would not be taken out of the pockets of the taxpayers. Many such villages would be established and financed by the government or by counties or cities or private organizations. The villages would exchange goods with each other.

A village would cost from sixty to ninety-six thousand pounds to organize. The homes would be erected at the center of the village—large apartments of modern construction. Thus, the people would live in communal dwellings; the meals would be prepared in a common kitchen; there would be playgrounds, schools, and the rest. And the fields would lie all around this communal garden center. The subscribers would lose nothing as the villages would be able to pay five per cent interest on the investment, though how they could do this without sending their goods into the general market was not disclosed. The Archbishop’s committee quickly dropped this rather hot potato by referring it to a parliamentary committee. There it did not even get a hearing. Whereupon Owen took his plan to the country. And in the subsequent agitation he broke completely with the highly respected persons who had hitherto given their moral support to his humanitarian adventures.

Almost without knowing it, Owen was slowly drifting out of the troubled ocean of benevolent capitalism into a new sea, unknown, uncharted, little understood.

Owen was not an economist, but a social philosopher. He was a schematic philosopher whose reflections drove him to make blueprints for the world of tomorrow. He was a utopian who set out to build his own Land of Nowhere.

His ideas were not, of course, wholly new. The dream of the City of Light and Justice was an old one with which men had played since Plato. Saint Augustine had described his own theocratic community—the City of God. Thomas More, recently canonized by that church which is today the stoutest defender of property, attacked the institution of private property, envisaged a planned society on the agricultural model in which the needs of the people would be the basis for calculating the volume of production, with a six-hour day and the exchange of goods between town and country without a money medium. This was More’s Utopia, discovered by his fictitious Portuguese scholar and sailor, Raphael Hythloday. He described a democratic government, widespread education, and that democratic ideal of the latter-day utilitarians—the greatest good of the greatest number.

After this came a whole string of explorers of the Land of Nowhere and founders of dream cities—Bacon with his Atlantis and his Solomon’s House, forerunner of the House of Magic where scientists would invent a perfect world; Andreas’ Christianopolis, peopled by artisans steeped in the higher learning, desiring peace and renouncing riches; and Campanella’s City of the Sun, with a government of the elite, without riches or poverty and a communistic dictatorship.

Behind all these visions, however, lay specific ideas—the effort to produce democratic equality, to create abundance, to redeem all men from ignorance, to secure peace. It was the ancient dream of ending war, poverty, vice, ignorance. And Owen, like many of the others, saw ignorance at the bottom of it all.

Before Owen, reformers of various types were playing with the idea of the labor theory of value—Babeuf, Etienne Cabet, and, above all, Saint-Simon and Ricardo. Others toyed with the concept of public ownership of industry, the principle that each should contribute to society according to his capacity and each should be rewarded according to his needs, as Le Blanc put it, or according to his services, as Saint-Simon put it. These ideas and a dozen others—Thomas Paine’s inheritance tax, Thomas Spence’s land tax (forerunners of the single tax), Prudhon’s assault on property, Godwin’s utilitarianism—filled the air, animated discussions, gave birth to movements.

It is a little difficult to determine just how Owen got hold of his various ideas. He had been an omnivorous reader in his youth, but had passed his mature years as a man of action in business and social reform. He had met, however, many of the eminent social thinkers of the time. Bentham was one of his partners. Ricardo was deeply interested in his plan. He knew William Godwin and was undoubtedly greatly influenced by him. He may have got hold of the labor theory of value from Ricardo or he may have evolved it himself. It is entirely probable that he came himself upon the important truth about the grand flaw in the economic system. In a memorial presented to the conference of powers at Aix-la-Chapelle he said:

The grand question now to be solved is, not how a sufficiency of wealth can be produced, but how the excess of riches, which may be most easily created, may be generally distributed throughout society advantageously for all and without prematurely disturbing the existing institutions and arrangements in any country.

That question is still baffling the statesmen who are trying to find the magic formula for distributing all that we can produce within the framework of the capitalist economy. No one else at that time saw this so clearly or expressed it so decisively as the grand problem of the age.

Owen still believed it might be worked out without prematurely disturbing the existing institutions. The very use of the word “prematurely” indicates his suspicion that eventually the “existing arrangements” would be disturbed. He hated revolution. He hated violence. He hoped that gradually, by means of education and by slowly insinuating his villages of co-operation into the existing society, they would expand, increase, and finally supplant the society. Owen himself said he owed his plan for these villages to a John Billars who recommended them in 1696 and whose pamphlet Proposals for Raising a College of Industry of All Useful Trades and Husbandry Owen reprinted.

Owen appealed to public opinion to adopt his plan. And as he crusaded for it he began to make it plain that he regarded this plan not merely as a palliative to meet the emergency of the depression, but as a wholesome pattern for the organization of society upon a new collective model. Owen was becoming the first great socialist leader of England—a utopian socialist, it is true, but nevertheless a socialist expounding what came to be the standard socialist diagnosis of the capitalist system.

He wrote articles for the newspapers, outlining his plan, and bought thirty thousand copies of the papers a day, which he sent under the frank of an M.P. to the ministers, the members of Parliament, magistrates, and religious leaders in every city. He spent twenty thousand dollars for this alone. He printed pamphlets by the thousands and carried on an extensive propaganda by every known means. His plan was opposed by the Radicals—advocates of parliamentary reform. They called his villages “parallelograms of paupers.” He was opposed by the Malthusians. Apparently he grew indignant at the opposition of the clergy. And so in a historic meeting he denounced the “gross errors that have combined with the fundamental notions of all religions.” He said that by the aid of these errors man had been made “a weak, an imbecile animal; a furious bigot and fanatic; or a miserable hypocrite.” “I am not of your religion,” he told them, “nor of any religion yet taught in this world.” Thereafter he lost the sympathy of a few high ecclesiastics like the Archbishop of Canterbury who had given him their support. It was possible then to demolish any proposal of Owen by calling him an “atheist.”

But events were playing into his hands. The depression following the war continued to deepen. The unemployed thousands, the dispossessed farmers and farm hands, the underpaid and enslaved mill workers grew wrathful. The poor-relief system was breaking down under the strain. Indeed, the whole subject of relief was just such a nightmare as it was in America in 1932, or, indeed, as it is today. England’s poor laws had been fashioned in the dark times of Henry VIII and Elizabeth; hence workhouses, the free materials to be processed by the poor, the overseers of the poor, and finally that most monstrous of all poor laws, the farming out of pauper apprentices. This remained the backbone of the English system until 1834. There was one more demoralizing addition—the allowance system, introduced in 1782, under which paupers were farmed out, their wages collected by the county authorities and augmented by a public subsidy. This demoralized the worker and made a paradise for the employer who wanted workers for pauper wages. England was spending ten million pounds on poor relief in 1783. In 1818 she was spending thirty-nine million.

Workers sought to combine, but the laws still forbade it. The wretched victims of relief and unemployment began to riot here and there. There were outbreaks among the midland miners. Mills were set on fire. The Ludites, named after Ned Ludite, a village idiot who to be avenged on his tormentors broke some machinery, began demolishing mill machines. The ministry was frightened. It remembered the terrible anger of the Paris mobs. It held fast to its confidence in the iron hand. Rioters were disbursed by hussars. The jails were filled. The habeas corpus act was suspended. Meetings were forbidden. The circulation of pamphlets was ruthlessly crushed. All the sacred guarantees of the Magna Charta were put under foot. Then came Peterloo. Some eighty thousand unemployed assembled on the field of St. Peter outside Manchester. It was an orderly meeting. The bands played God Save the King. But the authorities were terrified. And when an orator attempted to address the crowd, the soldiers were ordered to charge. Eleven were killed, four hundred wounded—some women and children. A thrill of horror swept over the country, horror in the breasts of the lords of land and cotton, leading to more suppressions; horror in the breasts of the poor at the death of their comrades.

In these desperate circumstances many responsible people in England, not knowing where the cure for all this disorder lay, were driven to consider with tolerance the plan of Robert Owen, who was so eternally positive about its value. Another meeting was called about it, another committee named, headed by the Duke of Kent. And this committee actually recommended that a trial be made with one village. It recommended that a fund of five hundred thousand dollars be raised. Owen himself promptly subscribed fifty thousand. But no other considerable amount was forthcoming. The bright vision faded. And Owen turned his eyes to the New World.

In 1826 on the banks of the Wabash River in Indiana, Owen established a village of co-operation on the model that he had been urging in England. New Harmony was already a co-operative community established by a group of German settlers. It was not, of course, formed upon the lines of Owen’s plan. And it was for sale. He purchased it for $182,000, brought his four sons to Indiana, and set about bringing to reality in the New World, away from the commercial crystallizations of the old one, his city of the sun. It lasted about two years under his direction and ended in failure. It was in the New World, to be sure, but the settlers attracted to it were quite as deeply saturated with the social habits and thinking of the Old World as the countrymen they had left behind. Owen rightly attributed the failure to the fact that the men of his day—like the men of our own—were unprepared by education and environment to live in such a community. He lost forty thousand pounds on the adventure and returned to England, no whit discouraged and with undiminished faith in the ultimate emergence of the new moral world of his dreams.

But there was another cauldron in the United States when Owen was steaming up New Harmony—a pot out of which a very different brew was coming. This was Lowell, Massachusetts. Indeed, New Lanark in Scotland and Lowell in America must be looked upon as the generating plants of the forces that would grow and envelop our society and clash, as they do now, in a death struggle.

Lowell was forging the weapons that the acquisitive man of the next hundred years would use to work his wonders. New Lanark was forging the moral weapons that reformers and crusaders would use to fight those who were armed with the predatory munition of Lowell.

On February 2, 1822, a group of New England gentlemen organized the Merrimack Manufacturing Company. Francis Cabot Lowell was a graduate of Harvard. Kirk Boott had been a student there until he enlisted to fight in the Peninsular campaign with Wellington. Nathan Appleton was a graduate of Dartmouth. Their colleagues, Paul Moody, Patrick Tracy Jackson, Thomas N. Clark, and Warren Dutton were practical men.

They selected a site for the building of a planned industrial town. That town was called Lowell. They built a power-loom mill that stands and is operated to this day. They chose the site because of its nearness to the Pawtucket Canal. The Canal belonged to a corporation that was owned by five hundred stockholders scattered all over New England. The Merrimack Company wanted the water power of the canal. So it sent Mr. Thomas N. Clark around New England to buy up the shares secretly. The company wanted machinery, and therefore arranged to get the processes and patents of the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham. The two companies made an arrangement “to equalize the interest of all stockholders in both companies by mutual transfers of stock” which was their way of saying the companies were merged by mutual exchange of shares. Indeed, here was the first corporate merger—the Merrimack Company, the Pawtucket Canal Company, and the Boston Manufacturing Company—a device that promoters would use to blow billions in bubbles during the next few generations.

The Canal and Merrimack Falls developed more power than the Merrimack Company needed. Also the company had more land than its mills and houses could occupy. Therefore, it formed a subsidiary—the Locks and Canals Company—with $600,000 capital and with Major George W. Whistler, U. S. army, and father of James Abbot McNeill Whistler, as chief engineer. To this company was transferred the operation of the water power and the construction and operation of a plant to build textile machinery. Thus the Merrimack Company became a holding company, owning all the stock of the Canal and Locks Company.

Here now was an integrated vertical enterprise which, for the first time, spun the yarn and also wove the cloth; it built its own machinery; it operated its own power canal, and it would, through the Canal Company, take a contract to build a textile plant, stock it with machinery, supply the site, and furnish the power to anyone who wished to embark in the same business.

It found the need for capital always urgent. It was, therefore, interested in an insurance company in Boston and in a bank, perhaps several, upon which it could draw for funds. In its numerous corporations, which grew in number, for it soon began to have an interest in other mills, it used the device of interlocking directorates. And it had begun to experiment with schemes for holding corporation meetings at times and in places that made it difficult for stockholders to attend.

It built company houses; sent a large bus around the countryside recruiting girls from the farms; built hundreds of boardinghouses managed by widows, where the girls lived. Naturally the little birds soon whispered in Boston tales of the goings-on of men and women in Lowell. A committee of ministers investigated the town and reported that the criticisms were unfounded, for here, happily, where a pious management worked the men and girls for eleven to thirteen hours, the creatures, in God’s own good providence, were too fatigued at night for the sins of the flesh. It was a heavenly dispensation. The pious gentlemen had made the discovery that the fatigue that God-fearing manufacturers generated in their workers was the greatest enemy of the devil.

In fairness to these gentlemen, it ought to be said that Appleton, and perhaps Boott, had met Owen, and that in their hard, New England way, they set up certain welfare controls. But they were conceived not so much in the spirit of humane consideration for their employees as for the purpose of maintaining order and efficiency. And order meant religion. Hence they established a church—St. Anne’s, which stands to this day. And later they built a Catholic church to bring the unruly Irish immigrants under some sort of discipline. They prohibited liquor in the boardinghouses and also “light and frivolous conversation.” They started a library and meeting places for discussions and later established The Lowell Offering, perhaps the first corporation house organ, edited by the girls. Some trace of Owen’s influence may have lingered here, for John Greenleaf Whittier sang of its “acres of girlhood,” “flowers gathered from a hundred hillsides,” “fair, unveiled nuns of industry,” and a local chronicler spoke of them as “troops of liveried angels,” which was probably laying it on thick for the benefit of pious Unitarian Boston.

But the chief significance of Lowell was that it forged the weapons of the acquisitive promoter and monopolist while New Lanark developed the weapons of the social reformer.

It is probably a fair estimate of the period to say that these two groups, added to those who had gone before—the Fuggers and Laws and a score of others—stocked the arsenals of the later rivals who would contend for the mastery of the world. The men of wealth now had the institution of property, the invention of money, the invention of credit, and, more important, the invention of bank credit, the corporation, the holding company, the subsidiary, the manipulation of corporations, speculation in corporate securities, the production of reservoirs of savings and the control of them, of bank and insurance and corporate funds—all this was ready to hand, this and the creation of the factory, of machinery, and of the techniques of management. With this the way was open for great numbers of ruthless and unscrupulous men to amass great fortunes.

At the same time, while philosophers and economists were fabricating the theory of individualism that created the perfect climate for their operations, another group, of which Owen was the great precursor and evangelist, was formulating the ideals and principles of social control in various forms, including collectivism, the theories underlying the claims of the workers, and finally the organizations through which the workers would challenge their masters and over many long and bloody decades wring from them one surrender after another. In that struggle, too, Owen was to take a pioneering part.

The labor-union movement got its first important impetus in England in 1824, just about the time Owen departed for America. It would not be true to say Owen had any part in this. He had shown no interest in unionism or in militant organizations of workers to exert pressure in collective bargaining against employers. He was not against this, but his interest was in a more fundamental rearrangement of society. He conceived of a system in which all the producing persons, from managers down, would be united in a common organization. But the plight of the workers admitted of no such delay as would be involved in realizing this dream. Workers were forbidden to combine. The Combination Acts dated from the sixteenth century. They were strengthened at intervals. The latest Act, made in 1800, forbade workmen to unite to force an increase in wages or reduction in hours or for other purposes, including pressure on another workman not to work. This law was rigidly enforced, and in the distress following the war jail sentences were invoked. Union to better the workers’ lot was called “sedition.” But in 1824, under the leadership of Francis Place, the Combination Acts were repealed and labor unions became legal.

The unions promptly united with the Radicals for parliamentary reform. Owenites had little interest in parliamentary reform. They were wrong in supposing that this was a futile step, since redress of the workers’ grievances required first that they have political power. But they were right in realizing that mere parliamentary reform would not of itself bring an economic cure, as the workers discovered quickly enough. And this led the unions in the years between 1824 and 1829 to seek some more specific and effective remedy. They wanted some direct action. And the only proposals in sight were those of Owen—the principles of co-operation. Hence in those years there sprang up an ever-widening movement for co-operation on the Owen model. But pending this, co-operative societies were organized to unite the producing and purchasing power of the workers for their common benefit.

England was filled with Owenite leaders. Societies of all sorts, as well as the unions, journals, lectures, bombarded the British ear with the new cult of Owenism. And when Owen returned from New Harmony he was literally pushed into the leadership of this movement. It is an odd phenomenon in Owen’s career that he thus became the head and front of a movement for co-operative buying and selling groups, in which he had little faith, and for militant trade unionism, in which he had perhaps less. It can be explained, in a man of Owen’s uncompromising intellectual integrity, only on the theory that by thus going along with the workers he would ultimately lead them to the realization of his own dreams. And indeed the workers themselves were almost completely infected with this dream as an ultimate goal.

There is no point here in tracing the development of the trade union, co-operative societies, and co-operative-village movements thus all intertwined. It is a long story. But what is interesting and important here is Owen’s attempt to establish labor exchanges upon a very radical model. The National Equitable Labour Exchange was launched in London in 1832. It was a plan for creating a co-operative market with the workers as producers and buyers. Members could bring their products to the exchange; they could also buy those products.

Most important was the means of payment. Owen had adopted the labor theory of value. He now conceived of labor as the standard of value. “The average physical power of men,” he argued, “has been calculated; and as it forms the essence of all wealth, its value in every article of produce may also be ascertained and its exchangeable value with all other values fixed accordingly.”

He therefore established a labor “standard” of value. He arrived at the estimate that sixpence was the average money value of an hour of labor. The value of any article was established thus: cost of materials plus cost of labor arrived at by multiplying hours by standard wage for that work plus one pence in the shilling for the cost of handling. The total was divided by six—sixpence being the average cost of labor per hour. This gave the amount of “labor time” incorporated in the article. For whatever this was worth, here was the germ of that doctrine of Marx that the use value in every article is the amount of socially necessary labor it contains or the social labor time requisite for its production. Here was an attempt by Owen to find a measure for that “jelly” of labor which is the essential value component of every article which Marx proposed.

Owen waxed enthusiastic as the unions grew in number and activity and he hailed the coming of the great era of co-operation. It took all sorts of forms, from efforts to establish villages to the creation of the great Builders’ Guild which became a co-operative construction organization owned by the workers, who also hired the managers.

But all these great experiments failed. Owen’s objective, of course, was to use trade unionism as an instrument of socialism. He himself came to see that it didn’t work. He continued for many years with his community building and preaching the gospel of the New Moral World. He edited journals, wrote books, prepared and delivered lectures, petitioned Parliament, in support of his philosophies on remaking the world by education and sound moral ideas. He spent every dollar he had on these adventures in recreation. By the time he was seventy-three years old all his fortune was gone. For the rest of his life his sons, who had settled in America, paid him an annual income of about $1800 a year, based upon a fictitious debt of $36,000 that, through a carefully arranged but imaginary debt, they were supposed to owe him. This was done to spare his pride. Thus supported he went on preaching his doctrines in London, in Paris, in America to the end. When he was eighty-seven he was carried by four officers to the platform at a meeting in Liverpool to which he had traveled in great pain to proclaim once more his doctrines. When he arrived home he sank into unconsciousness. He recovered for a brief spell and died November 17, 1858.

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¹Technics and Civilization, by Lewis Mumford, 1934.