USA > New Hampshire > History of New Hampshire, Volume III > Part 16
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The census of 1909 shows that there were 1,265 salaried officers in all the manufacturing establishments, such as super- intendents and managers, as well as the officers of the companies. All together were receiving $2,435,129, or an average of $1,965 each, and since the president, secretary, treasurer, etc., of large corporations receive the lion's share in the way of salaries, the pay of the superintendents and managers must average con- siderably less than the figure just given. The wage earners numbered 78,658 and they received together $36,200,262, or an average of $460 annually. Of course some received much more than this amount, and many received much less. An average of less than ten dollars a week is not a living wage during the
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times since 1909, considering the ever increasing cost of living and demands and cravings produced by a growing civilization. Few persons have the philosophical content of the Athenian sage and are thankful that there are so many things for sale that they do not want. Naturally each person craves every good thing that his neighbor enjoys and asks why it is that he can not have it. Convinced that he is not getting a fair share of the profits of his own labor the operative joins a Labor Organization. There are about a score of them in every populous city of the State. All classes of workmen are banded together under the oversight of a State Federation of Labor. They are claiming more and more clearly and loudly their rights, employing strikes as a last resort to get the same. Such organizations have greatly in- creased the price of labor, but the corresponding price of the necessaries and comforts of life has advanced perhaps more rapidly. The number of working hours in the day has decreased far below the old variable standard, when farm laborers worked from sunrise to sunset and often beyond. According to the law of 1891 ten hours constituted a day of contract labor ; the day's work has been reduced to nine hours in many establishments, and the clamor throughout the country is for a working day of eight hours, as is the rule among government employees. A law enacted in 1914 fixed fifty-five hours per week as the maximum allowed, thus providing for ten hours of labor on five days and a half holiday on Saturdays. Theorists are saying that five hours a day would be enough to keep the world in good condition, if the idle tramp and the idle rich could only be made to work.
The kind of operatives employed in mills and shoe shops and other places of manual labor differs much from what it was two generations ago. Then almost all the employees were of American parentage, people who came in from the farms to earn money more readily in the cities. Farmers' daughters worked in the cotton and woolen mills, with no foreigners in their company. At present the operatives are almost all of foreign birth or parentage, Canadian Frenchmen, Italians, Greeks, Poles, Russian Jews and a few from almost every nation under heaven.2 Hosts from the far East are clamoring for admission
2 The races that make up the population of Manchester have been reckoned as follows: French-Canadians 27,000, native stock 14,755, Irish 13.500, Greeks 6,000, Poles 5,000, Germans, 3,500, Swedes, 2,700, English
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and a chance to earn American wages. They like our individual liberty and our respect for the laborer. A dollar a day looks big to those who have been accustomed to work in the old countries for twenty cents per day. The skilled workman, who received there fifty and sixty cents per day, gets here three dollars a day and sometimes five dollars, as carpenter or mason.
This influx of foreign laborers is forcing the Americans out, up or down. Many are driven to new enterprises in the West; some are forced out of employment in old age; many married couples can not afford to rear children because of the competi- tion in labor and the high cost of living. Therefore thousands of old families of New England are becoming extinct in their old haunts, and we have to search for New England on the Pacific coast. A new population is taking possession of our cities and increasingly of the old New England farms. These new comers do not like to work in the mills and on the streets any better than the Americans once did. As soon as they can they move out and up. Unless the Americans are crowded up, they are forced down in the scale of living. Here and there may be found small communities of the old Yankee stock, who have become like the "white trash" of the South. The destruction of such poor people is their poverty, which engenders ignorance, crime, vice, and physical and mental deterioration.
It has been often said that the real prosperity and welfare of a State or nation does not depend on its farms, manufactures and accumulated wealth, but upon the kind of men and women it produces. It should not be concluded without reflection that the many manufactories of New Hampshire are indisputable evidence of prosperity. Where do the millions of dollars in profits go? The greater part may go into the pockets of absentee capitalists in Boston and vicinity, and then the evil of absentee landlords that has so injured Ireland may be repeated here in a varied form. Is the country really prosperous because wealthy mill owners can get shiploads of foreigners to come here and work for a smaller wage than Americans are willing to accept,
1,700, Scotch 1,600, Hebrews 850, Ruthenians 600, Syrians 600, Lithuanians 600, Italians 250, Portuguese 200, Russians 225, Norwegians 600, Armenians 200, Danes 60, Belgians 600, Chinese 55, Negroes 60, Finns 25, Hollanders 25, Swiss 20, Bulgarians 50, Albanians 40, Spaniards 15. Other cities have more Italians and Finns. Such statistics awaken thought, but need not arouse fear.
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and thus make themselves still richer? If "wealth accumulates and men decay," is the country a gainer or a loser thereby? The danger to our civilization is not that people from Europe and Asia are taking the places of natives of New England. The people from England, Scotland and Ireland need not flatter themselves that they are the elite of the earth; the Italians and Greeks can boast of a more ancient civilization and greater names in history. The Syrian and the Hindoo can quickly be developed into as bright and good citizens as any others. The mixture of many nationalities may produce the finest generations the world has yet seen. The immigrants are changing their language, names, occupations, ideas and character, yea, even their stature and facial expressions. They look, talk and act just like Yankees after two generations.
But what chance is there for the development of character for those who work ten hours a day in a mill or shoe shop, doing one little thing over and over by use of a machine or by hand? Can a man grow in grace and knowledge by cutting out heels for shoes year after year? Is it an educative process, or one that shrivels and dwarfs the soul? Once we had small, competing shops where workmen learned to do and actually did many things each day, and where they had to be ingenious and exercise their wits. Now it takes no brains and developes no power of thinking to do the work assigned to each one in a well organized, mammoth manufactory. The housemaid hates to wash dishes, to do the same uninteresting thing three times a day; the operative may have to do a more insignificant thing thousands of times each day, and he becomes a half-alive autom- aton. Work ought to develope the workman instead of stunting him. It ought to fill his heart with joy instead of bitterness and envy. Have the great manufacturing cities of England produced better Englishmen than the yeomanry of the time of Oliver Cromwell? Will the mills and shops of New England turn out better citizens than did the farms of one hundred years ago? It is scarcely thinkable. The evil is clearly foreseen, and search is being made for the proper remedy.
Then, too, the "labor-saving" machinery of recent times only increases labor. The products do not keep up with our growing desires. The pace is set by the agent of the greedy capitalist,
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and the employee must work up to standard, as fast as he can, without a moment of rest nine or ten hours a day. The machin- ery has, perhaps, doubled or thribled the wages of workmen, but it has multiplied profits by twenty or thirty. It is the relative income that frets the laborer and makes him dislike his task- master. He asks why machinery should not benefit the man who runs it as much as the man who buys it, and he wonders how the general agent of a group of mills really earns one hundred thousand dollars a year, while he is getting for his family only six to twelve dollars a week. The unrest and dis- content resulting does not develop the highest type of manhood nor produce good American citizens. The operative knows not the freedom and independence of the farmer of other days.
Yet a little ready money, regularly received, has more allure- ments than distant crops and fruits of trees. If the farmer now has a farm of his own with buildings and stock, he can manage to get a comfortable and independent living, especially if he has a large family of growing boys, each one of whom is an asset on a farm and an expense in the city. If a farm is bought, with a mortgage, and interest has to be dug out of the rocky and sandy soil, the returns are meager. Without stock scarcely anything can now be earned on a farm during the long months of winter, and the expense of keeping warm is great. Farming for the man without capital has few enticements. Many try it for a short time and fail. The farmer seems to be getting less for his labor and the capital invested than even the operative in the mill or shoe shop. Therefore young men crowd into the cities, where there is more ready money and more of social life. The only way that farming can be made more attractive is to make it more remunerative. The beginner in any occupa- tion must practice economy, work steadily and save something regularly.
Chapter XIII NATIVE SONS AS MANUFACTURERS AND INVENTORS ABROAD
Chapter XIII NATIVE SONS AS MANUFACTURERS AND INVENTORS ABROAD.
Local Pride in Men of Mark-Jonas Chickering, Maker of Pianofortes- The Pilsburys, Flour Millers of Minneapolis-Cyrus Wakefield, in Whose Honor a Town Was Named-Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, Navigator of the Air-Moses G. Farmer, Pioneer in Electricity-Walter A. Wood, Maker of Farm Machinery-Nehemiah S. Bean, Maker of the First Steam Fire-Engine-Robert P. Parrott, the Man behind the Gun- Sylvester H. Roper, Mechanical Engineer.
TT must be of interest to all who claim New Hampshire as their place of birth or residence to know something of the men of mark, of whom it can be said with local pride, "This man was born there." Not all the great men have staid in their native State; some were made great by the better opportunities and new experiences found elsewhere. It is the purpose of this chapter to call to mind a few of them.
Jonas Chickering, son of Abner Chickering, a blacksmith and small farmer, was born in New Ipswich April 5, 1797. He got a little book knowledge in the town school and a lot of practical wisdom in his trade as a cabinet maker, to which he was apprenticed at the age of seventeen. At this business he worked three years with Mr. John Gould. Early he displayed a talent for music and learned in leisure moments to play skill- fully the fife and clarionet. At the age of nineteen he made some repairs on the only pianoforte in New Ipswich, although it was the first instrument of the kind he had ever seen, and then he made a thorough study of its structure. It is needless to say that he restored the damaged pianoforte to tune and use. Soon after he commenced, alone and unaided, the building of a small organ with no instruction or drawings, starting out with only a growing idea. This did not prove to be a practical success, but he was acquiring knowledge which afterward was of service. Many apparent failures may precede a large success.
In 1818 he went to Boston and obtained employment after
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a year with a maker of pianofortes, Mr. John Osborne, one of the very few manufacturers of that musical instrument then in America. He quickly mastered the business and after three years was able to form a partnership with Mr. Stewart for inde- pendent work. This lasted three years and then Mr. Chickering operated alone till 1830, when Capt. John Mackay became asso- ciated with him in business, thus providing sufficient capital. At once a large building was erected and the finest woods were imported. His partner was lost at sea, and Mr. Chickering con- tinued the business alone. This building was destroyed by fire in 1852, and a mammoth structure at once succeeded it, where one hundred men or more were employed. Mr. Chickering died ere this building was completed, and his sons continued to manufacture pianofortes, making the name of the firm famous throughout the country. At one time there were two thousand pianofortes made annually by the Chickerings. Ere the death of Mr. Jonas Chickering, December 8, 1853, fourteen thousand completed products of his skill and industry had been scattered in homes and halls to cheer and bless mankind. In beauty of exterior, in tone and finish, the Chickering pianos had no superior in the wide world. They received a prize medal at the world's fair. Mr. Chickering gave a thousand dollars to the academy in his native town. He was a member of the Massachusetts legis- lature, highly esteemed among all lovers of music, a kind, affable, unassuming man. He had talent and business ability. Circum- stances of his own choosing enabled him to combine the two. Character gained him credit and capital, and thus he amassed wealth while contributing something worth while to the pleasure and education of many.
George Alfred Pillsbury was born in Sutton, August 29, 1816. He was educated in the common schools of his native town. At the age of eighteen he went to Boston and spent a year as clerk in a grocery and fruit store. Returning to Sutton he engaged in the manufacture of stoves and sheet iron ware. In 1840 he went to Warner as clerk in a store, and the following year he purchased the business and carried it on eight years. In 1848 he went into a wholesale dry goods house in Boston and spent a year. Returning to Warner he entered into trade there again for two years. In 1851 he removed to Concord and until 1875 was purchasing agent of the Concord Railroad. He was
Jeg Pillsbury
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one of the organizers and directors of the First National Bank of Concord in 1864 and was its president for twelve years after 1866. He also was one of the organizers of the National Savings Bank. In Warner he had served as selectman, town treasurer, post master and representative to the legislature. In Concord he was on the board of alderman, representative to the legisla- ture, appraiser of real estate, trustee of the Centennial Home for the Aged, and of the State Orphans' Home on the Webster farm in Franklin. He and his son gave the organ of the First Baptist church in Concord. When he left Concord in 1878 to reside in Minneapolis, his fellow citizens gave him a testimonial of respect with three hundred signatures. He became a member of the firm of C. A. Pillsbury and Company of Minneapolis, the largest flouring firm in the world. In 1884 he was elected mayor of Minneapolis. He served as president of the City Council, the Board of Trade, the Chamber of Commerce, the Homeopathic Hospital, the Board of Water Works, the St. Paul and Minne- apolis Baptist Union, the Northwestern National Bank, and the American Baptist Missionary Society. His son, Charles A. Pills- bury, graduated at Dartmouth in 1863 and was the big man of the flouring firm in Minneapolis.
Mr. Pillsbury contributed liberally to Colby Academy at New London and to Pillsbury Academy at Owatumna, Minne- sota, giving to the latter two buildings at a cost of $75,000. To Sutton, his native town, he presented a fine soldiers' monument ; to the town of Warner he gave a free library building of brick with stone trimmings; to Concord he gave a general hospital in honor of his wife, Margaret Sprague Pillsbury, on the fiftieth anniversary of their wedding. During his lifetime he gave $500,- 000 and in his will he bequeathed $300,000 more to various edu- cational, charitable and religious institutions, among them being Pillsbury Academy, to which he gave $250,000. He died in Minneapolis July 17, 1898. Business ability was born and nurtured in him; a rare opportunity enabled him to amass wealth ; a generous heart and Christian principle prompted him to distribute liberally for the service of others.
John Sargent Pillsbury, brother to George A. Pillsbury, was born at Sutton, July 29, 1827. He was clerk for his brother in a store in Warner and later formed a partnership with Walter Harriman of that place, who afterward was governor of New
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Hampshire. Removing to Concord he did business there for two years as a merchant tailor and dealer in cloth. In 1855 he settled in Minneapolis and engaged in hardware business. The firm of which he was a member lost $38,000 by fire in 1857, yet the business was continued till 1875, when he sold out and entered into the business of milling with his nephew, Charles A. Pillsbury, and his brother became a member of the same firm.
Mr. Pillsbury was active in raising and equipping regiments for the Civil War. He was a member of the State Senate for thirteen years. Because of his interest and assistance given to the State University, he having built for it a Hall of Science at a cost of $150,000, he was called the Father of the University. As a Republican he was elected governor of Minnesota in 1875 and was twice re-elected. Lumbering and construction of rail- roads engaged his active interest. This did not hinder him from being director of several banks, president of the Board of Regents of the University of Minnesota. and director of the Pillsbury-Washburn Flour Mills. The town hall at Sutton was his gift.
Cyrus Wakefield was born in Marlborough, that part which was afterward set off as Roxbury, February 14, 1811. He had little schooling, but an inquisitive and inventive mind kept him prying into things and trying to put his fancies into visible facts. The successes of men he knew and read about aroused in him an ambition to accomplish something in the world and to acquire the influence and power that wealth brings. Picking cotton in a mill at Peterborough did not quite satisfy him, neither did he find contentment in reading a controversy between Calvin and Arminius, which a minister gave him to read. So he went to Boston as soon as he was able, to seek his fortune. Here he became clerk in a grocery store and utilized his spare moments in doing a little business for himself in the way of buying and selling empty casks and barrels. Thus he saved a thousand dollars and the path of wealth opened before him. Not going to college as was suggested to him, he never knew how little he lost and always supposed he had lost a great deal, not realizing perhaps how much he gained of practical wisdom that the average college student fails to acquire. He made up his loss in part by attending evening schools, visiting various debating
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societies, and listening to courses of scientific lectures. Was not this as good a curriculum as Latin, Greek, higher Mathematics and football? Who is the educated man, if not the one who has learned to use to advantage all his capacities?
While he was engaged with his brother in independent grocery business in Boston he purchased, almost by accident, a small quantity of rattan, that had been thrown out of a ship as refuse matter, and sold it at a profit to some chairmakers, who used the outside of the cane in seating chairs and threw away the rest. Mr. Wakefield conceived the ideas of utilizing all the rattan, cane, pith and shavings. Having a brother-in-law in Canton, China, he ordered split rattan from there and prospered in the trade, selling his importations throughout the United States. In 1856 he went to New York for a short time and bought up all the rattan in the market, created a "corner" as they say, and had a monopoly of the trade. This enabled him to fix the price of rattan for a while, and so he became suddenly rich. One does not have to go to college to learn such tricks in trade, yet only a few persons have the foresight and ready cash to seize the flitting opportunity.
Soon after he removed his business to South Reading, Massachusetts, where water power and steam power took the place of hand power. His business kept enlarging till he used ten acres of floor space. Building after building was erected. Every bit of the rattan was made into something that would sell. He saw that a rapidly growing town would raise the price of real estate, and so he bought all the land he could, draining swamps and filling in lowlands, thus creating building lots. Real estate speculators did not rob him of the unearned increment. Thus he was enabled to present to the town a site for a Town Hall and to build the Hall at a cost of $120,000. There was some inducement to do this for the people had voted to change the name of the town to Wakefield in his honor. Of course such a man was director in the banks, and on the School Board and stockholder in Ice and Gas Companies. To him that hath shall be given.
Mr. Wakefield died October 26, 1873. Here is the way he has been sketched as to general character. "He was a man of iron will and resolute purpose, combined with great physical
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endurance. Energy, perseverance, and an indomitable courage in the face of almost insuperable objects were his prominent characteristics. He had a keen perception, and results that other men reached by hard thought seemed to intuitively come to him. He knew human nature thoroughly and could read a man at a glance. To those who knew him best he revealed at times a warm, genial and tender nature, though to a stranger he might seem distant. He was charitable, giving not only in large sums to public enterprises, but cheering the hearts of the poor with his generous gifts. Many students struggling for an education remember with gratitude his timely aid. As a merchant he was shrewd, industrious, persistent, and careful in the details of his business." Why should he be esteemed a successful man of business? Because he gained riches? He had business fore- sight and insight. He saw the latent possibilities in things others discarded. He had original ideas and worked them out to prac- tical results, thus contributing to the advancement of civilization in the proper use of nature's products. He made the earth a little better place to live on for a short time. He did not succeed by imitating others ; he just acted out himself.
From Jefferson, in Coos county, came Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, born there August 20, 1832. He got an education without much schooling, while many others get much schooling without an education. A few weeks each summer and blazing pine knots to read by in the winter evenings made up his college. In his fifteenth year he walked from his home to Portland, Maine, and there took the boat to Boston, where he apprenticed himself for three years, to learn the trade of boot and shoe cutting. Thus he got money enough to study medicine. By compounding medicines and practice as a physician he made money enough to retire from a disagreeable occupation, and then he began to give public lectures on scientific subjects. Before this he had taught a class in chemistry. His chemical experiments pleased and instructed his listeners.
In 1857 he began the study of navigating the air in balloons. In 1860 he completed a mammoth balloon, six times larger than any previously built. Its lifting capacity was twenty-two and one-half tons. The balloon itself weighed three and a half tons. Its perpendicular diameter was one hundred and fifty feet, and its transverse diameter was one hundred and four feet. Four
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hundred thousand cubic feet of gas were furnished for it in four hours. On the trial trip five passengers were taken up a distance of two miles and a half. This experiment led to his introduction to Professor Henry of the Smithsonian Institute, with whom he co-operated in taking meteorological observations at different points on the continent and at high altitudes in balloons. The same were wired to Washington and thus it was possible to make weather predictions and the United States signal service grew out of this movement.
In 1861 Mr. Lowe sailed in his balloon from Cincinnati to some point in South Carolina and had some diffculty in getting back, being suspected as a spy. It took him five days or more to go by rail the distance that he had made in a balloon in eight hours. During the Civil War he rendered important service as chief aeronaut of the United States army, which position he held for three years. During this time he made over three thousand cable ascensions and was the first to establish telegraphic com- munications between a balloon and various portions of the army and Washington at the same time. Many were the inventions of Mr. Lowe to make his balloons of military service, among them being a way of producing water-gas beside any stream or pool of water. Thus in three hours the aeronaut could reinflate his air-ship. His system of field aeronautics was introduced into the British, French and Brazilian armies, and the emperor of Brazil offered to Mr. Lowe a commission as major-general to serve in the war with Paraguay, which he declined.
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