As just cited there necessarily would be thousands of periodical publishers affected—virtually ruined. But, let us go down to things elemental in this question—down to the stumpage.
The great educational white way of our periodical literature is builded upon wood pulp.
In an opening paragraph of this volume I adverted to that fact. The chief pulp woods are spruce of the North—even of the distant North—and the Northwest. Then come cottonwood, basswood and soft maple, of the South, Southeast and New England. Of course, there are several other kinds of pulpwoods, but they are not used extensively for the manufacture of white paper, unless chemically treated, and such treatment makes them expensive. Of the pulpwoods I have named, spruce is far and away the most extensively used. From spruce is produced the best pulp. In “milling,” it shows body, fiber, strength—it gives toughness to the milled sheet or the Web roll.
But that is enough. I am not an expert in pulp-wood stocks. The point I am trying to call to the reader’s attention is that any legislation which cuts down the consumption of wood pulp must necessarily “affect” some other folks besides “a few magazine publishers.”
First, a just adjudication of such a piece of legislation as that proposed in Mr. Hitchcock’s rider amendment would put from thirty to fifty per cent of our weaker (but excellent) periodicals on the financial rocks—put them out of business. They consume thousands of tons yearly of pulp-wood paper.
It will, I think, be freely admitted that such periodicals would be out of—forced out of—the pulp-wood market—I mean out of the wood-pulp paper market, which amounts to the same thing.
But that is not all. The strong weeklies and monthlies are not going to be put out of business by legislation of that rider character. They will continue in business. They will meet its unjust exactions[169] by readjustments. They are printing on sixty to eighty pound stock. Some parts of their periodicals are printed on even heavier stock. They will go to the paper mills and demand lighter stock, of special finish—and their demands will be met—and fifty to sixty pound stock will be used. The special finish will give the reader just as presentable a magazine, typographically, as he now receives.
But you observe that the publisher will be saving from twenty to fifty per cent in stock weight.
You will also observe that the paper mills will be using twenty to fifty per cent less wood pulp than they are now using.
You will also observe that the railroads will haul twenty to fifty per cent less of pulp timber and less wood-pulp paper than they now haul.
“Only a few magazine publishers will be affected,” eh?
Let us “recast” as far as we have gone.
The owners of pulp wood acres or stumpage would be affected, would they not? There are probably three to five hundred of them in the country, taken at a low estimate.
They are not of the “few magazine publishers” are they?
Pulp mill and other investors in pulp-wood stumpage seldom buy until they have an estimate by some skilled judge as to the probable “cut” the acreage will yield. For this purpose the prospective purchasers usually employ one or more “timber cruisers.” A timber cruiser is a man so skilled and experienced that he can look at a standing tree and tell you within a hundred feet or so how much lumber it will saw or how many cords of pulp or other wood it will cut. He “steps off” an acre, sizes up the available trees growing on the acre, averaging up the large trees with the small ones, and then estimates or calculates the average wood or lumber growth on that acre. He then goes off to some other acre. The latter may be only a few hundred yards or it may be a mile or two from the acres last measured, the estimate on which the “cruiser” has carefully noted in his “field book.”
The second acre he “works” as he did the first, and so the “cruiser” goes on with acre after acre through a forest of ten, fifty, a hundred, or it may be a million or more acres of “stumpage,” always careful to note the “light” and the “heavy” timbered sections, and marks with a sharp, shrewd and experienced eye an estimate of[170] the number of acres covered by the light and the heavy growth of timber. When he has covered the acreage his employer contemplates buying, he comes back to civilization, turns in his field book and makes a report to the boss. On that showing the boss buys or declines.
Sometimes, of course, the careful, prudent boss may have two, three or a dozen cruisers, covering different fields of a vast forest section and, sometimes, virtually trailing each other. In the latter case, the buyer seeks to use one cruiser’s estimate as a check on the other. In any event, however, the purchase or investment is usually made on the showing the cruisers have made.
Now, this talk about timber, cruisers, etc., may be uninteresting to the reader. I sincerely hope, though, he will read it and follow me along the same lines a little further. My object is to show how wide of the truth—how unjustly or ignorantly wide of the truth—Mr. Hitchcock was when making the statement, which it has been repeatedly and reputably asserted he did make, to the effect that the legislation he sought would “affect only a few magazine publishers.” I have stated, and have given what I believe to be sound, valid reasons in support of the statement, that legislation of the nature, covered by his rider amendment ultimately—and necessarily—must be either annulled by the courts or be so broadened as to remove its special or class features. Of course, Mr. Hitchcock wanted—and he still wants—legislation of the nature indicated in that rider to become operative law. It is my belief he entertained such hope and desire when he asserted that an enactment of the character of his rider would “affect only a few magazine publishers.” At any rate, it was with such belief I introduced this division of our general subject.
As previously stated, legislation of the character sought by Mr. Hitchcock cannot be enacted into operative law without cutting down the consumption of wood pulp from thirty to fifty per cent.
Such a cut in consumption, I am here trying to show, cannot be made without affecting the earnings and lives of men—many thousands of men and families—who cannot even be imagined as of those “few magazine publishers.”
When the stumpage owner decides to cut five, ten, fifty, a hundred or more thousand acres for milling, another gang of men—“road blazers”—is sent into the forest. If the transportation is to be by[171] water, some river or smaller stream, these latter men select suitable roll-ways and boom yardages along the stream. From each of these they “blaze” or mark the trees and smaller growths to be felled and the obstructions to be removed in order to provide a haulage roadway—usually providing for both wagons and snow sleds or sledges. If the transportation is to be by rail, corresponding work is done, the roadways branching in from the forest to the rail sidings where the loading is to be done. Not infrequently “spur tracks” are blazed which sometimes run for miles into the forest away from the main line of the railway.
Following these men who mark out the “haulways,” come a far more numerous body of men with axes, saws, hooks, oxen, mules and other equipment, including cooks, “grub” and other things necessary to feed and shelter them. These, also, are factors—elemental or primal factors—in the production of wood-pulp from which most of our white paper is made. Numerically they, in the aggregate, number thousands.
Most certainly they cannot be counted among the “few magazine publishers” referred to by Mr. Hitchcock.
With equal certainty it can be said that each of these thousands would be materially affected in his industrial occupation by any legislation or other influence which caused a shrinkage in the demand for wood-pulp.
In the fall and winter of the year (sometimes in other seasons as well), an army of men—not thousands, but tens of thousands in number—swarm into the pulp wood forests. They are axemen, “fiddlers” (cross-cut sawyers,) foremen, gang foremen, ox drivers, mule drivers, horse drivers. Here also is again found the cook, the “pot cleaner,” the “grub slinger” and other servers of subsistence to the “timber jackies” of the various camps.
Any material reduction in the consumption of wood-pulp would affect them, would it not?
None of them publish magazines, do they?
This brings us down to the pulp mill. Of course each mill has a hundred or more men employed getting its wood floated down the rivers or streams during the spring floods, or “freshets,” if their transportation is by water. They are log “berlers”, “jam” breakers, shore “canters,” “boomers,” etc. If their working stock comes by rail,[172] there are “loaders,” “unloaders,” “yarders,” etc. Then come in the thousands of mill men, engaged on the work of reducing the wood to pulp. If the pulp mill has not a paper mill in immediate connection, as often happens, then the railroad is immediately interested in the reduced tonnage haul, and likewise every man who works for the railroad becomes interested industrially.
Even a triple-expansion brained man could not figure these thousands of industrial workers into the ranks of those “few magazine publishers” whom Mr. Hitchcock, it is asserted, repeatedly asserted, would alone be affected by his urgently urged amendment.
Next, we reach the paper mill. How many thousands of men are employed by them, I do not know. Of the many other thousands—wives and children who are dependent upon those workers for clothing, shelter and subsistence—I cannot make even a worthy guess. The reader can make as dependable an estimate as I, probably a more dependable one. But readers will unitedly agree that all these thousands of workmen, wives and children would be affected by any reduction in the consumption of wood-pulp paper.
All readers will also agree that no one of these is a magazine publisher.
Thus far we have seen, in considering the “reach” of Mr. Hitchcock’s recommended legislation, that it would have affected the earnings and the lives of many thousands of our people—people who cannot, in even perfervid imagination, be classed among his “few magazine publishers.” In this connection, however, should be noted the fact that when the paper leaves the paper mills, with the thousands dependent upon their operation and success, the paper proper passes into the custody of the transportation companies—railroad and water—chiefly the former—and of the thousands of operatives they employ. Next comes the thousands engaged in the cartage interests in cities throughout the country, wherever printing is done. In cities of the first and second classes there is usually found a division of the cartage interest which confines its service almost exclusively to the work of carting paper from car, depot, dock or warehouse to the printing plant which consumes it.
Here, then, in the last two classes named, must be found several thousands more workmen who would necessarily be adversely affected by a shrinkage of thirty to fifty per cent in the pulp wood cut.[173] Those thousands, mark you, do not include the thousands of women and children dependent upon the earnings of those workmen. Yet they would necessarily be affected by any shrinkage in wood-pulp consumption.
And again it must be admitted by every man—and will be admitted by any man with as much brains as directs the activities of any lively angleworm—that none of the thousands here mentioned are magazine publishers. None of them could possibly be of the “few magazine publishers” referred to by Mr. Hitchcock.
So far we have touched upon only the elements of production. While the people employed in the several divisions of the pulp-wood industry may run, numerically, into many tens of thousands, in the great division of the printing trades, they run into the hundreds of thousands. I refer to the great printing and publishing trades—the trades which turn the pulp paper into periodicals and books—the trades whose work directly educates us.
Before attempting to designate the various divisions of this class, or to indicate the vast multitude—both men and women—to whom they give employment, I desire to present a few quotations, showing that these trades and these hundreds of thousands of employes are, in the slang language of the street, “onto” not only the controlling—the ulterior—motives of Mr. Hitchcock but also that they know and understand and feel something of the far-reaching wreck and ruin to homes and to lives which legislation of the nature he proposed must bring to this industrial division of our general citizenship.
Under date of May 20, 1911, Mr. M. H. Madden wrote me the following letter. While Mr. Madden may not be as widely known as is Postmaster General Hitchcock, he not having had the advantage of a federal cabinet position to broadcast his fame, there are few men better known among the personnel of the printing trades than is Mr. Madden, and equally few men there are who are better informed on the cost of carriage, handling and distribution of second-class mail.
In this letter Mr. Madden speaks particularly of the alleged Postoffice Department “deficit.” While this much-talked of “deficit” is made the subject of a short subsequent chapter, Mr. Madden’s letter presents several other points trenchantly pertinent to the subject we are now considering, to-wit: that the printing trades—all branches and classes of it, from the pressfeeder and bindery girl to[174] the shop superintendent and publisher—are alive to the dangers with which legislation of the “rider” character is fraught:
Chicago, May 20, 1911.
My Dear Mr. Gantz—For a considerable time President Taft has directed attention to a supposed deficit in the Postoffice Department revenues, he accepting the figures of his Postmaster General that the amount of the shortage for 1909 was above $17,000,000, while that for 1910 was cut down to less than $6,000,000.
An authorized statement by Mr. Hitchcock, sent out on May 27, 1911, declares that for the six months of 1911 there is a surplus in postal receipts ranging from $1,000,000 to $3,000,000. With the fact kept in view that there have been increases in expenses in many directions and the further fact that second-class mail tonnage, on which great losses occur—according to the Hitchcock plan of keeping books—has increased, the manifest inconsistency involved in Mr. Hitchcock’s discovery is too transparent to permit of discussion.
Factors which have been left out of the reckoning, among others might be mentioned the progressive increased amount of business of the postal department, with but slight advance in the percentage of cost for transacting the same; a general agitation for better service on the part of the public which awakened the authorities to a fuller responsibility of their duty, and the important circumstance that there has been a new alignment of the House and Senate Committees on Postoffices and Postroads, has caused a moving-up process, we might say shaking-up process, in methods that sadly needed furbishing and of ideas that required practical demonstration. The effect of improving the system of transmitting the postal funds promptly to the national treasury instead of leaving the same to accumulate in the common centers, where they were earned, is seen by the immediate wiping out of the need for a balance of $10,000,000 with which to do business. Such an ancient method of conducting postal business would probably do in the period when the pyramids were built, but that system had finally to surrender, it being too archaic for even the Postoffice Department to adopt.
In a communication to me under date of August 9th, 1911, Mr. Madden gives expression to the following very informative statements:
In connection with the Hughes postal inquiry I would like to inform you of the total addition to the expense of conducting the Postoffice Department which became effective July 1, 1911. You may avail yourself of these facts in your argument, as they are official, orders having been issued by Postmaster General Hitchcock for these additional expenditures.
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CHAPTER VII. POSTAL REVENUES FROM ADVERTISING.
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CHAPTER IX. MR. HITCHCOCK STILL AFTER THE MAGAZINES.
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