Social Changes in America

As we study the United States census of 1930, we come to the conclusion that the increase in industrial production in the last ten years has been revolutionary; but it is not only technical capacity which has been transformed— it is the entire social life, and that means the structure of society.

We are helpless in the midst of this evolution, which destroys the old framework; we have benefited by this state of affairs through a great increase of material efficiency, but at the same time we have been made to suffer through unemployment and the disintegration of certain classes of society. It is very probable that we do not stop to measure the extent to which the world we live in is being drawn into this changing vortex. The United States is the country in which these changes have been particularly rapid. The passion for production has been greater there than elsewhere, for there the brakes of tradition and of long-established routine did not have a reactionary influence.

The decennial census of 1930, the principal results of which we now know, permits us to point out certain changes in the social structure whose extent is not confined to the United States, but will be found to be quite general. We are thus able to deduce indications of an important tendency of our times which it would be imprudent to neglect.

The reclassification of activities by professions for the population over sixteen years of age is shown by the following table, making a comparison of percentages between the census of 1920 and the last one of 1930.

It is easy to discern at once the fundamental phenomenon that is here demonstrated when production in its real sense (agriculture, mines, and industry) loses 7.1 per cent, whereas the social functions of distribution (commerce, transportation, business, domestic service, and the liberal professions) absorb 7.3 per cent more personnel. This indicates a transformation in the structure of society which is due to mechanical improvements, and which will manifest itself in every civilized country sooner or later. In fact, simple common sense suggests to us that machine development will permit us from now on to produce more and more things with fewer and fewer workmen; to this mechanical improvement is due the above figure of 7.1 per cent loss in the personnel of production.

The ‘technocrats,’ of whom much was heard a little while ago, seem to have the idea that these people released by technical improvements will not find other means of employment; they seem to be hypnotized by the unprecedented amount of unemployment, and it is not difficult to understand why this is so. But the labor statistics covering the decade 19201930 show us, at least as concerns the United States, that this very considerable personnel released by the machine has quite naturally turned toward other operations, which are those of distribution in every category of production.

Mechanical output no longer has the relative simplicity of the manufacture of yesterday. If fewer workmen are needed to assure what might be called the strict material manufacture, it is at the same time necessary today to have an infinitely more complex and more intelligent personnel to create and prepare an organization to secure results. To make a certain article may require only one workman, but how many designers, engineers, accountants, inspectors, and overseers were necessary so that the ultimate workman, alone before his machine, could proceed with this fabrication? And then, in addition, does not the manufactured article, when finished, have to be sold? This becomes more and more difficult as overproduction proceeds, and it becomes necessary to resort to the use of ‘high-powered’ salesmanship to secure buyers; an entirely new process of selling technique develops, owing to the competition among numbers of rival selling agents.

Finally, following the general mechanization of our existence, a thoroughgoing collective structure of society has surreptitiously been set up. It still allows the appearance of individual business, the home, the autonomous family, but after all it is only in appearance that they subsist. This real collectivism — which, whether we like it or not, we must acknowledge — requires an entirely new personnel.

Let us be specific in this regard as to the results which the United States census gives us, ‘Distribution’ gains 7.3 per cent, but what are the details behind this figure?

The first thing that strikes us, if we go behind the comprehensive figures given in the table, is that if agriculture has lost 4.5 per cent in ten years, while mines and industry have lost 2.6 per cent, commerce and transportation have gained 2.9 per cent. Without counting the innumerable means of transport whose numbers have been immensely increased by the automobile, so-called commerce has developed a formidable personnel these last years in the United States — salesmen, dealers, brokers, agents, publicity men, agents in land speculation, and so forth. In the domain of office work the growth has also been remarkable: the number of clerks, stenographers, bookkeepers, office boys and messengers, telephone operators, and so forth, has increased by 1 per cent. In the liberal professions the same thing is true; we find an increase of 0.9 per cent in the category of engineers, designers, men charged with vast manufacturing projects, inspectors and organizers, social engineers, psychologists for studying the aptitudes of personnel, and so forth.

Even in the field of what is generally termed ‘service’ there is a gain, although not among the personnel occupied as domestics in private families. Before 1870 this last category represented 75 per cent of those in so-called ‘service,’ but to-day less than half this percentage is thus accounted for. At the present time it is under collective conditions that domestic services survive in the United States, in the persons of janitors of large apartment houses, elevator men, laundrymen, waiters and attendants in restaurants and hotels and apartment hotels. When you ring a doorbell, someone will always come, but it will not necessarily be a domestic whose face is familiar to you. ‘Service’ personnel has increased by 2.5 per cent.

These figures covering the years 1920 to 1930 correspond to a period of prosperity in which America developed to excess all this great army of distribution, publicity, and expansion. There is no doubt that the addition of this large number of people to the field of distribution is in certain respects pathological. The crisis is already responsible for a brutal decrease in this class. Nowhere, in fact, has unemployment been so serious as among the ‘ white collar ’ workers, especially among office clerks and the like.

Nevertheless these phenomena which we have just emphasized are certainly destined to endure; they represent a basic and permanent change in our social structure, and are a logical consequence of the great industrial revolution of our time.