Gone for the Day: I Decide to Spend the Depression in the Bosom of the Family--and Commend the Programme to All Able-Bodied Husbands

I

IT has been my custom in recent months to sit up nights rather later than usual waiting for the return of prosperity. The vigil, while as yet unrewarded by the approach of the prodigal, has afforded an opportunity for a wide range of reading, and in the course of my searchings for the truth I have happened upon two observations which have all the earmarks of destiny.

The first of these teeming passages, supported by authentic data, makes the bald assertion that ‘between the years forty and forty-five, 90 per cent of all business men meet reverses and begin to lose their accumulations; and that between forty-five and fifty, ninety-seven out of every hundred actually lose all their money.’ The second, lacking in documentary evidence but none the less profound, is in the nature of an advertisement in a magazine devoted to sports and recreation, stating that the editors guarantee that a man will live longer and more cheaply and lose less money by forsaking his desk and espousing the great outdoors — and have a heap sight more fun. In other words, all one needs to do to lose his shirt is to stay in business long enough; the way out of the dilemma leads through the fields and streams!

Here, indeed, was not only a warning against the inherent dangers of trade, but at the same time a practical plan of escape from the blighted world of business. In my lighter moments I had toyed with the notion of an early retirement, but, the world being too much with us, I had reached the age of reason without exercising the option. There was something obligatory, however, about these emphatic broadsides, and, leaving a ‘career’ suspended in mid-air, I promptly took the great resolve to quit the market place and dare the perils of private life.

Now, to those who may from time to time find themselves afflicted with this outlandish urge, let me say that it is a far simpler matter to get into business than it is to get out of it. The involvements of an occupation, however brief, need time to unravel. There are friendly attachments to be severed, genial contacts to be broken; and if, as is not unlikely, there is something sentimental about your secretary, a scene of dramatic proportions must be gone through with.

When it comes to parting company with your associates it is well to be pretty specific in your reasons for pulling out; and if the move is contemplated in early life, — say at sixty-five, — you must be careful not to usurp the prerogative of seniority. Quitting trade is on the order of getting a divorce. You really ought to go away for it — to Paris or Reno or Vienna, where the atmosphere is more conducive to freedom. In the West, where my separation was effected, the union between man and his desk is practically indissoluble.

II

I had, in my time, dabbled in a variety of enterprises alleged to be gainful, but my earlier ventures were never very spectacular. A nonconformist by nature, I was a poor conference man, and my attendance at business luncheons was quite ragged. The dread of becoming a key man kept me under constant self-repression. Ever since I entered commercial life my chief concern has been not so much with ‘getting on’ as with ‘getting out.’ Reared in the South, where business is taken in broken doses, I no doubt acquired some inhibitions along these lines which have been difficult to shake off. There may even be a trace of heredity in my lukewarm attitude toward aggrandizement, for I can remember from boyhood that the scions of the first families came home pretty regularly for lunch.

Since I was engaged as statistician in a brokerage house, and was thus conversant with financial fiction, it was no trick at all to balance very favorably my personal and domestic budget. I was further fortified in my mad career by a beneficence which had lately come to my wife — it having been always understood between us that I was marrying for the long pull, not just for a quick turn. It was a princely heritage, and we doubted our fitness to cope with such a bewildering array of values as was contained in the formidable portfolio. But the depression has relieved our anxiety on this score: the figures have since been reduced to such simple terms that a child could understand them.

Invoking the ‘dismal science’ of statistics again, I reached the amazing truth that for each business year I passed six hundred unimaginative hours, traveled twenty thousand monotonous miles, and spent a good deal of money, counting in my deficits at bridge, in order to reach a sunless canyon where the air is heavy and the noise something terrible. The mere act of commuting thus represented an heroic exertion; in terms of Cook’s tours, it must have approximated, in extent, an excursion to the Upper Cataract.

Cooling toward the turmoil, after having survived both boom and panic, I did not fancy the prospect of a morbid hiatus and the repetition, ultimately, of the same giddy cycle. As for booms, they offer fresh testimony to the impermanence of riches. I am convinced, in looking back over the melee, that we were never supposed to keep the mushroom moneys made in those fertile, if futile, years. I can remember when we were kids that the magician used to let us hold the rabbit; but he always made us give it back. Extra-curriculum activities for the younger generation habitually include visits to the planetarium, the waxworks, and the stockyards; to these phenomena should be added by all means an expedition to a mirage as one of the most effective lessons in the appreciation of booms! The luscious balances of ’29 have become the margin calls and memories of ’31. The milestones of progress, to which we pointed with pride as new highs were methodically ticked off, are as millstones around our neck.

The boom was the new era, not only of industrial expansion, but of personal expansiveness as well; material success had its sharpest reflection in recreative accoutrements, with life about to take on a blend of elegant leisure. The Gospel of the Golden Age insisted that every gentleman’s portfolio include membership in a dude ranch, a deer sanctuary, a duck marsh, a trout stream. Another fifty points — and we should all be either country gentlemen or animal trainers! Fumbling around the bottom of my ‘strong’ box a while ago, I found among the chattels which had escaped my banker’s summons a certificate evidencing proprietary rights in the Noxubee Plantation. Failing at first to identify the instrument, I presently recalled that it was another one of those overindulgences of the moon-shooting days — a quail club down deep in the South, a sylvan retreat in the country of calomel, quinine, and cotton. I cannot account for my predilection for quail: I hold no partiality for gallinaceous birds. An aristocratic sport, it was no pauper’s pastime — you could send a couple of youngsters through college for what it costs to bring down a season’s bag of birds. But it was the kind of thing bull markets did to you! Some of us would stoop to nothing less swanky than yachting, and when a burgee of my own design — a bull, rampant on a field of ticker tape — flew from the masthead of my fifty-footer, I was certain that life was becoming very real.

III

But where there’s a boom there’s bound to be a panic — a formula as fixed as the stars, always obscured in the elation of the moment. It has been quite a tumble from those dizzy heights of opulence. The wagon used to back up to the door to deliver a load of old masters; to-day it comes to take away the piano. Gay spirits turn melancholy under the strain of attrition; brooding over the lost cause is sapping all the fun out of life. Desperate endeavors to salvage something from the crumbling pyramid have been shattering to health and disposition. The intensest application results only in exhausting, ineffectual breast beating. Long, sullen days at the office are rewarded by still falling prices, shrinking volume, and vanishing profits. The only help our fiscal healers give us is the admonition to keep up our standard of living — even to the third and fourth generation of mortgages.

There is, after all, nothing that one can do about it. A great impotence has fallen upon us all. There may very well be another Promised Land — but a Moses has not yet emerged from the rushes. I have, in company with the multitude, taken high hope in plans and panaceas, lent an attentive ear to the Washington Warblers, passed all the blindfold tests — only to see each propitious start toward recovery peter out under the weight of ‘constructive developments.’ One hundred and twenty million Americans could not be broke — for long; science, invention, chemistry, would presently come to the rescue. But with another spring come and gone, and nothing to keep dandelions out of the front lawn, one loses faith in the efficacy of the test tube. To take the veil, even at so tender an age as forty, seemed, under the harassing circumstances, the obvious thing to do.

For many of us the boom, in spite of its subsequent rupture, still constitutes life’s greatest rapture. A hundred points here, another hundred there . . . faith in America . . . financial independence . . . prosperity now and forever.... At least we can tell our children that when the bulls overran the country in the late nineteentwenties we were not hiding in safety vaults and savings banks — and neither was our money. Liberty bonds paid only 4 per cent, but that pyramid in Du Pont looked as though it would reach the sky, and that last ride together on Radio was one of the boisterous bits of life. There was seduction about the unseemly revels; tips that always made good; ‘pools’ that poured out profits; syndicates that did their stuff before the ink was dry on the signatures; ‘jiggles’ that went over big. What if the whole thing was only in fun! The trouble with the boom was that nobody had a sense of humor.

Legend would have us believe that every business man who has made a big success of himself started on a shoestring. I am embarking upon my adventure with a family, ten acres, and a homestead with a broad, overhanging roof which ought to support a pretty fair-sized lien. Besides, considerable renovating has been accomplished as a result of an expansion programme conceived in the spendthrift days of ’29. There is the ‘ Westinghouse’ wing, the ‘Union Carbide’ conservatory, the ‘General Motors’ guest room, the ‘Allied Chemical’ foundation. And, while these embellishments have their artistic value, I am afraid that if another nail were to be driven into her tottering timbers the old manse would fall quite apart.

IV

In the suburb where I live, I am something of a curiosity. ‘Was it his health?’ ‘I hear he got the gate.’ ‘Whatever does he do at home all day?’ ‘Satan finds mischief for idle hands.’ . . . My wife, who I am sure secretly dreaded having a man around the house, has reconciled herself very gracefully to an awkward situation. The children, too, are getting used to it; one hopes that they will not, too soon, ‘get on to it.’ I think I am far enough along in my new way of life to point out the lights and shadows: you see more of your family, less of your banker; you learn things you never knew before — how clocks are wound, where the screwdriver is kept, who the people are who come to the front door; you help Junior with his spinach and sit in at morning exercises; you go down and watch Number Seven come through; you write your Congressman; you are forever doing odd jobs around the house, thus creating a demand for skilled labor to come in and repair the damage you have done.

But keep out of the kitchen! A while ago I rashly took upon myself the ‘running of the roost’ during a brief absence of the Lady of the House. I threw open a hospitable door to kindred spirits. We had meals at all hours and menus of intricate design. We demanded, I am afraid, a superlative sort of service. Returning somewhat earlier than anticipated, my wife was greeted with the resignations of our favorite cook and an able stewardess. My suggestion that everything seemed to run smoothly enough during her sojourn and that perhaps the walk-out may have been a gesture of displeasure over her premature homecoming fell considerably short of mending matters.

Your private life becomes an open book. Lie late of a morning and a score of eyes are upon you. The handy subterfuge of a hard day at the office no longer holds as an excuse for evading an occasional opera, a dinner, or a dance; being no longer a business man, you are not supposed to get tired. You will perhaps miss the ‘funny’ stories of your business buddies, but I find that neighborhood gossip is fully as interesting as brokerage-house chatter — and there is just about as much truth in it. I am aware that loafing has licked a lot of good men and the indulgence of ease is most certainly fatal to excellence. But the outlets of leisure are legion, and this broad and befuddled land must abound in opportunities not essentially commercial. One day passes pleasantly enough painting the side of the barn; another in grandiose speculation about the whole duty of man.

Because my preferences at the moment seem to lie outside of the countinghouse does not imply that I am in revolt against business — which has rewarded me beyond my deserts. I do think, perhaps, we may have overrated the importance of our ‘big shots,’ with all their optimistic obsessions and fiscal frailties. They take themselves with not enough salt and try to keep too many balls in the air at one time. It should be made a misdemeanor for anyone to serve on more than one board of directors. I am in favor of a more even distribution of halos.

The fellows who still punch the time clock chide me for what they are happy to call my inertia, and profess wonder at my absenting myself from the hurly-burly. But I hear of no fortunes being amassed in these anæmic days and I am sure there is no business — or my stocks would be doing better. In fact, I suspect the boys of being a little hypocritical about their office life, and I venture to guess that their daily grind from nine to five could be compressed into a much briefer space with no great disturbance to the economic structure. The lawyers are busy getting us out of things we had them get us into a while back; the doctors, albeit they tell me collections are not brisk, are quite active mending derangements brought on by the debacle. But elsewhere business, from all I can gather, is mostly a matter of going through the motions — and very slow motions indeed.

I am hopeful that the cult of leisure is enlarging, that the movement away from swivel chairs is gaining ground. The brave little band of wayward brothers in my own community has lately welcomed to its midst a number of erstwhile executives of substance and influence — with the early prospect of additional novitiates. We do no proselyting, but word reaches us that civic and commercial bodies, alarmed at the drift back to the home, are discussing ways and means of combating the heresy.

For my part, at the present rate of extinction of interest and dividends on our guilty-edged securities, I estimate that the household can get along without any visible means of support from me until about the spring of 1933, exclusive of non-recurring income realized through the sale of the family jewels. After the last dividend shall have been passed, the final vestige of savings — that silly concession to conservatism — drawn down, and all assets frozen stiff, I suppose I shall wait as a suppliant at the portals of trade. In the happy interlude, having tasted of the sweets of the contemplative life, I move that every married man who can afford it — the single men are better off down town — give up work for a period of at least twelve months; a sabbatical year, as it were, for fresh perspective and domestic research. Such a programme would immeasurably help the unemployed, relieve congestion in bond houses, test the permanence of marriage, and brighten one’s outlook in countless different ways. Besides — we want some more company!