Thomas Wolfe, page 496
Or, to a reader interested in history, the following illustration may make the operation of the system plain: at the end of a long line that stretches from the pyramids until the very portals of his house, the great Pharaoh, with a thonged whip in his hands, which he vigorously and unmercifully applies to the bare back and shoulders of the man ahead of him, who is great Pharaoh’s great chief overseer, and in the hand of Pharaoh’s great chief overseer likewise a whip of many tails which the great chief overseer unstintingly applies to the quivering back and shoulders of the wretch before him, who is the great chief overseer’s chief lieutenant, and in the lieutenant’s hand a whip of many tails which he applies to the suffering hide of his head sergeant, and in the head sergeant’s hand a wicked flail with which he belabors the pelt of a whole company of groaning corporals, and in the hand of every groaning corporal, a wicked whip with which they lash and whack the bodies of a whole regiment of grunting slaves, who toil and sweat and bear burdens and pull and haul and build the towering structure of the pyramid.
Or, finally, for those readers with an interest in simple mechanics, the following illustration may suffice. Conceive an enormous flight of stairs with many landings, and at the very top of it, supreme and masterful, a man, who kicks another man in front of him quite solemnly in the seat of the pants; this man turns a somersault and comes erect upon the first and nearest landing and immediately, and with great decision, kicks the man in front of him down two more landings of these enormous stairs, who, on arriving, kicks the next incumbent down three landing flights, and so on to the bottom, where there is no one left to kick.
Now these, in their various ways, and by the tokens of their various imagery, fairly describe the simple but effective operation of the Company. Four times a year, at the beginning of each quarter, John S. Appleton called his general manager before him and kicked him down one flight of stairs, saying, “You’re not getting the business. The market is there. You know what you can do about it—or else . . .”
And the general manager repeated the master’s words and operations on his chief assistant managers, and they in turn upon the district managers, and they in turn upon the district supervisors, and they in turn upon the district agents, and they in turn upon the lowly salesmen, and they in turn, at long and final last, upon the final recipient of all swift kicks—the general public, the amalgamated Doakses of the earth.
It is true that to the lay observer the operation did not appear so brutally severe as has been described. It is true that the iron hand was cunningly concealed in the velvet glove, but there was no mistaking the fact, as those who had once felt its brutal grip could testify, that the iron hand was there and could be put to ruthless use at any moment. It is true that the constant menace of the iron hand was craftily disguised by words of cheer, by talk of fair rewards and bonuses, but these plums of service could turn bitter in the mouth, the plums themselves were just a threat of stern reprisal to those who were not strong or tall enough to seize them. One was not given his choice of having plums or not having plums. It was no exaggeration to say that one was told he must have plums, that he must get plums, that if he failed to gather plums another picker would be put in his place.
And of all the many wonderful and beautiful inventions which the great brain of John S. Appleton had created and conceived, this noble invention of plum-picking was the simplest and most cunning of the lot. For be it understood that these emoluments of luscious fruit were not wholly free. For every plum the picker took unto himself, two more were added to the plenteous store of Mr. Appleton. And the way this agricultural triumph was achieved was as follows:
Mr. Appleton was the founder of a great social organization known as the Hundred Club. The membership of the Hundred Club was limited exclusively to Mr. Appleton himself and the agents, salesmen, and district managers of his vast organization. The advantages of belonging to the Hundred Club were quickly apparent to everyone. Although it was asserted that membership in the Hundred Club was not compulsory, if one did not belong to it, the time was not far distant when one could not belong to Mr. Appleton. The club, therefore, like all the nobler Appleton inventions, was contrived cunningly of all the familiar ingredients of simplicity and devilish craft, of free will and predestination.
The club had the extraordinary distinction of compelling people to join it while at the same time giving them, through its membership, the proud prestige of social distinction. Not to belong to the Hundred Club, for an agent or a salesman, was equivalent to living on the other side of the railroad tracks. If one did not get in, if one could not reach high enough to make it, he faded quickly from the picture, his fellows spoke of him infrequently. When someone said, “What’s Bob Klutz doing now?” the answers would be sparse and definitely vague, and, in course of time, Bob Klutz would be spoken of no more. He would fade out in oblivion. He was “no longer with the Company.”
Now, the purpose and the meaning of the Hundred Club was this. Each agent and each salesman in the company, of no matter what position or what rank, had what was called a “quota”—that is to say, a certain fixed amount of business which was established as the normal average of his district and capacity. A man’s quota differed according to the size of his territory, its wealth, its business, and his own experience and potentiality. If he was a district agent, his personal quota would be higher than that of a mere salesman in a district. One man’s quota would be sixty, another’s eighty, another’s ninety or one hundred. Each of these men, however, no matter how small or large his quota might be, was eligible for membership in the Hundred Club, provided he could average 100 percent of his quota—hence the name. If he averaged more, if he got 120 percent of his quota, or 150 percent, or 200 percent, there were appropriate honors and rewards, not only of a social but of a financial nature. One could be high up in the Hundred Club or low down in the Hundred Club: it had almost as many degrees of honor and of merit as the great Masonic order. But of one thing, one could be certain: one must belong to the Hundred Club if one wanted to continue to belong to “the Company.”
The unit of the quota system was “the point.” If a salesman or an agent stated that his personal quota was eighty, it was understood that his quota was eighty points a month, that this was the desired goal, the average, toward which he should strive, which he should not fall below, and which, if possible, he should try to better. If a salesman’s quota was eighty points a month, and he averaged eighty points throughout the year, he became automatically a member of the Hundred Club. And if he surpassed this quota, he received distinction, promotion, and reward in the Hundred Club, in proportion to the degree of his increase. The unit of the point itself was fixed at forty dollars. Therefore, if a salesman’s quota was eighty points a month and he achieved it, he must sell the products of the Federal Weight, Scale & Computing Co. to the amount of more than three thousand dollars every month, and almost forty thousand dollars in the year.
The rewards were high. A salesman’s commission averaged from 15 to 20 percent of his total sales; an agent’s, from 20 to 25 percent, in addition to the bonuses he could earn by achieving or surpassing his full quota. Thus, it was entirely possible for an ordinary salesman in an average district to earn from six to eight thousand dollars a year, and for an agent to earn from twelve to fifteen thousand dollars, and even more if his district was an exceptionally good one.
So far, so good. The rewards, it is now apparent, were high, the inducements great. Where does the iron hand come in? It came in in many devious and subtle ways, of which the principal and most direct was this: once a man’s quota had been fixed at any given point, the Company did not reduce it. On the contrary, if a salesman’s quota was eighty points in any given year and he achieved it, he must be prepared at the beginning of the new year to find that his quota had been increased to ninety points. In other words, the plums were there, but always, year by year, upon a somewhat higher bough. “June Was the Greatest Month in Federal History”—so read the gigantic posters which the Company was constantly sending out to all the district offices—“Make July a Greater One! The Market’s There, Mr. Agent, the Rest Is Up to You,” etc.
In other words, this practice as applied to salesmanship resembled closely the one that has been known in the cotton mills as the stretch-out system. June was the greatest month in Federal history, but July must be a bigger one, and one must never look back on forgotten Junes with satisfaction. One must go on and upward constantly, the race was to the swift. The pace was ever faster and the road more steep.
The result of this on plain humanity may be inferred. It was shocking and revolting. If the spectacle of the average Federal man at work was an alarming one, the spectacle of that same man at play was simply tragic. No more devastating comment could be made on the merits of that vaunted system, which indeed in its essence was the vaunted system at that time of all business, of all America, than the astounding picture of the assembled cohorts of the Hundred Club gathered together in their yearly congress for a “Week of Play.” For, be it known, one of the chief rewards of membership in this distinguished body, in addition to the bonuses and social distinctions, was a kind of grandiose yearly outing which lasted for a week and which was conducted “at the Company’s expense.” These yearly excursions of the fortunate group took various forms, but they were conducted on a lavish scale. The meeting place would be in New York, or in Philadelphia, or in Washington; sometimes the pleasure trip was to Bermuda, sometimes to Havana, sometimes across the continent to California and back again, sometimes to Florida, to the tropic opulence of Miami and Palm Beach; but wherever the voyage led, whatever the scheme might be, it was always grandiose, no expense was spared, everything was done on the grand scale, and the Company—the immortal Company, the paternal, noble, and great-hearted Company—“paid for everything.”
If the journey was to be by sea, to Bermuda or to Cuba’s shores, the Company chartered a transatlantic liner—one of the smaller but luxurious twenty-thousand tonners of the Cunard, the German Lloyd, or the Holland-American lines. From this time on, the Hundred Club was given a free sweep. The ship was theirs, and all the minions of the ship were theirs, to do their bidding. All the liquor in the world was theirs, if they could drink it. And Bermuda’s coral isles, the most unlicensed privilege of gay Havana. For one short week, for one brief gaudy week of riot, everything on earth was theirs that money could buy or that the Company could command. It was theirs for the asking—and the Company paid for all.
It was, as we have said, a tragic spectacle: the spectacle of twelve or fifteen hundred men, for on these pilgrimages, by general consent, women—or their wives at any rate—were disbarred—the spectacle of twelve or fifteen hundred men, Americans, of middle years, in the third decade of this century, exhausted, overwrought, their nerves frayed down and stretched to the breaking point, met from all quarters of the continent “at the Company’s expense” upon a greyhound of the sea for one wild week of pleasure. That spectacle had in its essential elements connotations of such general and tragic force in its relation and its reference to the entire scheme of things and the plan of life that had produced it that a thoughtful Martian, had he been vouchsafed but thirty minutes on this earth and could he have spent those thirty minutes on one of the crack liners that bore the Hundred Club to tropic shores, might have formed conclusions about the life on this tormented little cinder where we live that would have made him sorrowful that he had ever come and eager for the moment when his thirty-minute sojourn would be ended.
III
It was a few minutes before one o’clock when Joe entered his brother’s office. The outer sales room, with its glittering stock of weights, scales, and computing machines, imposingly arranged on walnut pedestals, was deserted. From the little partitioned space behind, which served Jim as an office, he heard the sound of voices.
He recognized Jim’s voice—low, grave, and hesitant, deeply troubled—at once. The other voice he had never heard before.
But as he heard that voice, he began to tremble and grow white about the lips. For that voice was a foul insult to human life, an ugly sneer whipped across the face of decent humanity, and as it came to him that this voice, these words, were being used against his brother, he had a sudden blind feeling of murder in his heart.
And what was, in the midst of this horror, so perplexing and troubling, was that this devil’s voice had in it as well a curiously human note, as of someone he had known.
Then it came to him in a flash—it was Merrit speaking. The owner of that voice, incredible as it seemed, was none other than that plump, well-kept, jolly-looking man who had always been so full of cheerful and good-hearted spirits every time he had seen him.
Now, behind that evil little partition of glazed glass and varnished wood, this man’s voice had suddenly become fiendish. It was inconceivable, and as Joe listened, he grew sick with horror, as a man does in some awful nightmare when suddenly he envisions someone familiar doing some perverse and abominable act. And what was most dreadful of all was the voice of his brother, humble, low, submissive, modestly entreating. He could hear Merrit’s voice cutting across the air like a gob of rasping phlegm, and then Jim’s low voice—gentle, hesitant, deeply troubled—coming in from time to time by way of answer.
“Well, what’s the matter? Don’t you want the job?”
“Why—why, yes, you know I do, Bob,” and Jim’s voice lifted a little in a troubled and protesting laugh.
“What’s the matter that you’re not getting the business?”
“Why—why . . .” Again the troubled and protesting little laugh. “I thought I was . . . !”
“Well, you’re not!” The rasping voice fell harsh upon the air with the brutal nakedness of a knife. “This district ought to deliver thirty percent more business than you’re getting from it, and the Company is going to have it, too—or else! You deliver or you go right on upon your can! See? The Company doesn’t give a damn about you. It’s after the business. You’ve been around a long time, but you don’t mean a damn bit more to the Company than anybody else. And you know what’s happened to a lot of other guys who got to feeling they were too big for their job, don’t you?”
“Why—why, yes, Bob. . . .” Again the troubled and protesting laugh. “But—honestly, I never thought . . .”
“We don’t give a damn what you thought!” the brutal voice ripped in. “I’ve given you fair warning now. You get the business or out you go!”
Merrit came out of the little partition-cage into the cleaner light of the outer room. When he saw Joe, he looked startled for a moment. Then he was instantly transformed. His plump and ruddy face was instantly wreathed in smiles; he cried out in a hearty tone: “Well, well, well! Look who’s here! If it’s not the old boy himself!”
He shook hands with Joe, and as he did so, turned and winked humorously at Jim, in the manner of older men when they are carrying on a little bantering by-play in the presence of a younger one.
“Jim, I believe he gets better-looking every time I see him. Has he broken any hearts yet?”
Jim tried to smile, gray-faced and haggard.
“I hear you’re burning them up in the big town,” said Merrit, turning to the younger man. “Great stuff, son, we’re proud of you.”
And with another friendly pressure of the hand, he turned away with an air of jaunty readiness, picked up his hat, and said cheerfully: “Well, what d’ya say, folks? Didn’t I hear somebody say something about one of the madam’s famous meals, out at the old homestead? Well, you can’t hurt my feelings. I’m ready if you are. Let’s go.”
And smiling, ruddy, plump, cheerful, a perverted picture of amiable good-will to all the world, he sauntered through the door. And for a moment the two brothers just stood there looking at each other, drawn and haggard, with a bewildered expression in their eyes.
In Jim’s decent eyes, also, there was a look of shame. In a moment, with that instinct for loyalty which was one of the roots of his soul, he said: “Bob’s a good fellow . . . . You . . . you see, he’s got to do these things. . . . He’s . . . he’s with the Company.”
Joe didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He had just found out something about life he hadn’t known before.
And it was all so strange, so different from what he thought it would be.
[¬]
A PROLOGUE TO AMERICA
[Vogue, February 1, 1938]
SCENE: A night of dazzling light above America. As the action begins, the body and bones of the American continent are revealed from East to West. The vision at first is governed by silence and the still white radiance of the blazing moon. The view in this first instant is appalling—it seems lifeless and inhuman, like the design and landscape of a prehistoric world. And yet one knows at once that life is here. The place is burning with terrific instancy, and suddenly one knows that it is alive and swarming with the tremendous energies of forever and of now.
Steeped in this moon-bright stillness of essential time, the vision sweeps the planetary distance of the continent: southward from Maine, around the thumb of Florida, up and around the belly of the Gulf, southward again along the curve of Mexico, and up and out again toward Oregon along the tremendous outward bulge and surge of the Pacific shore.
The vision nears and deepens with the speed of light: the million smaller shapes and contours of the earth appear. And now, for the first time, through the steep silence of the moon, a sound is heard. Vast, low, and murmurous and like a sigh that breathes forever at the ledges of eternity, it is the sea, that feathers constantly upon the shores of time and darkness—and America.
the sea (immensely far below, upon twelve thousand miles of coast, with lapse and reluctation of its breath, a vast recessive sigh):
The sea—
It is the sea—the sea
