Radio Script #96
Little Talks on Common Things
February 11, 1951
Did you ever stop to think what a common and valuable thing is discontent? Yes, I said valuable, for all progress, all advancing change is the result of discontent. The person who is thoroughly contented with things as they are is out of place in a changing world. There is a vast difference between the agitating changer, who wants to sever all contact with the past, who wants not only a New Deal but a new pack every time he turns around — there is a vast difference between that sort of social radical and the man who accepts gradual, natural change as the law of life and therefore shows a hearty discontent with things as they are. This America of ours was made by dissatisfied people. They wanted freedom from oppression and they got it. They wanted elbow room, and a vast continent was open to them. They wanted a higher level of living, and they kept getting it, higher and higher. If we ever think we have arrived at where we want to be, we shall stop being Americans. Americans are constantly discontented.
There are benighted employers who like to keep reminding American factory workers that they are better off than working men in Britain or France or Italy or China. What they say falls on deaf ears. The American worker doesn’t care about comparisons with the rest of the world; what he wants is to be better off than he used to be. He wants to keep climbing up on the American escalator. But the American factory worker is not the only American. The American with money to invest is an American too. If he doesn’t get a fair return on his invested money, he can protest just as loudly as the workman who feels that he doesn’t get a fair return for his time and effort.
Now there are certain economic facts that are plain for anyone to see. The more invested money a country has, the more earned money it gets. Wages go up in strict proportion to the increased investment of new capital and the increased installation of new machinery and new power. Where does the capital come from that makes these increases possible? There was a time when it came chiefly from the savings of individuals outside the industries themselves. That is still a significant source of capital, but it is no longer the largest source. Most of the capital used to expand and develop modern industry in America comes from a source that is hated and denounced by the social radicals. It comes from profit. Expansion in our principal industries is made by plowing in the profits of the industries themselves.
Profits mean increased investment. Increased investment means increased wages. Therefore profits bring increase of wages. If you think that is old fashioned economics, read what a prominent modern economist one respected by his whole profession — had to say in a recent issue of the Harvard Business Review. There Dr. Sumner Schlichter explained in careful and unimpeachable detail the connection between larger profits and larger payrolls. He insists that labor and capital had both better awaken to the fact that the conditions which cause larger profits, higher wages and increased employment are the same conditions.
By this time some of you are asking why this lecture on economics? Why doesn’t he get on with some more stories of old days in the Kennebec Valley. I’ll tell you why. It is because the wealth and strength of our Kennebec Valley was built by people who understood the values of those sound economic principles which some of the modern economic theorists would cast idly aside. The Hallowells and the Gardiners, the Kings and the Sewalls, the Lithgows and the Conys, the Boutelles and the Gilmans, the Totmans and the Coburns — all the leading men of industry up and down the Valley knew that progress and business success depended upon teamwork of capital and labor. Those men never shunned hard work themselves, and their workmen were encouraged to invest their savings in the Valley’s growing industries.
In fact the industrial team is more than a span; it is a triple rig. Besides the investor and the worker, there is the manager, whose lot it is to be much of the time criticized by both — by investor because profits are not larger, by worker because wages are not higher. And it is just as true now as it was a hundred years ago, when the Connors, the Nyes and the Totmans logged the big “Saplin” up by Moosehead Lake, that it takes all three to make American business, and, remembering that fact, therefore the American citizen feels a kind of snug contentment in the midst of natural, persistent discontent.
We have been giving a lot of attention lately to Fairfield. Let’s give Vassalboro a hearing again tonight. We haven’t mentioned that good town since we talked about Sam Burleigh’s newspaper. A hundred and twenty-five years ago a kind of all-around business man kept an account book after Getchell’s Corner. The entries in that old book run from May 20, 1824 to October 8, 1825. There is no inkling of the writer’s name, though the book bears the names of persons who owned it years afterward. One of those names reads “Hattie Gray, Oak Grove”. Another reads “Mary Ennna Smiley, Vassalboro, Maine”. Also written on a fly-leaf are the words “Oak Grove Seminary, November 29, 1870”. On the leather cover of the old book is written “No.5”. The man who kept this book in 1824 obviously had varied business interests. He had a potash factory; he owned river boats; he controlled fish seines; he dealt in groceries and dry goods; he notarized documents.
Frequent entries in the book are headed “Long Boat”. Apparently he operated one of those old craft that carried freight up and down the river, as well as passengers. They were poled along close to the bank, sometimes even pulled along by oxen. It was in such a craft that Jeremiah Chaplin and his family came to Waterville after they left the Sloop Hero at Augusta. The Vassalboro business man enters many instances of credit to people who boarded his boatmen. Other items charge the Long Boat with furnished supplies; as on May 20, 1824 when the boat is charged for 1 bushel of potatoes, 13 cents; and 4 3/4 pounds of pork, 47 cents. On the same day he charged William Crosby 75 cents for a rafting oar. This may have been for use on Crosby’s own craft, but it is quite as likely that Crosby was charged with replacement of one of the merchant’s oars which he had broken.
The most common name in the accounts, as the older Vassalboro residents would naturally suspect, is Jacob Southwick, for in 1824 he was indeed the leading citizen of Getchell’s Corner. He too operated boats and on July 10, 1824 the book carries the following charges for one of Jacob’s boats:
“8 lb. Spikes .80
7i lb. Nails .75
8i qt. N. E. Rum 1.00
1 qt. W. I. Rum .31
21 ft. Plank .45
10 lb. Spanish Brown .50
1 3/4 gal. Sperm Oil 1.17
1 Paint Brush .67
60 lb. Resin 2.40
Especially interesting is the evidence that one of this ledger maker’s enterprises was hand-shewn lumber. Not once, but several times in the book we encounter items like this: 5 horse loads chips, 31 cents. I was surprised to find in this account book a reference to apples sold by the pound. Not until after the first World War did I ever see apples sold in any form except measured in the familiar peck and half-peck round measures. So I was surprised to see in the account book this entry: “February 7, 1824, Edward Starr, 9i lb. apples, 46 cents”. Then it occurred to me that this entry didn’t refer to whole apples at all. Of course it meant dried apples, the sale of which was common during late winter and spring months in the old days.
In season when the fish were running, that was one of the Vassalboro merchant’s biggest enterprises, and this old account book casts interesting light on the once thriving fish industry of the Kennebec. The book never mentions salmon, although we know they continued to come up the river until after the dam was built at Augusta. The fish in which this man dealt were herring and shad. In the spring of 1824 the season opened on May 19 with a good price, $2.75 a hundred for herring, and ten cents a piece for shad. These people who weighed dried apples only counted herring and shad. They sold the fish by the piece, regardless of weight. The next day, May 20, the price had dropped to $2.00 a hundred for herring and 8 cents a piece for shad. Before the season closed on June 10 the price had dropped to one cent a piece for herring and four cents for shad. Then as the run thinned out, it went up again to the original price of $2.75 and 10 cents.
An idea of the size of the fish run on the Kennebec in those days 125 years ago can be gained from the fact that, between May 24 and June 10 in 1824, this one dealer sold 26 barrels of herring and about 500 shad. Apparently he did not buy the fish from fishermen, but operated his own seine, hiring men to do the actual work; for on June 18 he credited John Dennett with $4.00 for fishing. That was eight days after the season closed, and may well have been Dennett’s wages for the Whole season. On July 6 he entered a bigger credit for Nathaniel Hosmer. It reads: “By his part of all fish taken in the seine $53.27”. In July our merchant had no more fresh herring, but was then selling smoked herring for one cent each. This dealer not only operated his own seine. He also outfitted other fishermen. In May, 1824 he made the following entry in the accounts: “Daniel Marshall, salt, rum, etc. for his fishermen, $5.83; credit, by boarding Reuben Patridge 39 weeks and 5 days while attending store up to l0th May 1824”.
In April, 1825 he sold to Jacob Southwick 2 qt. Boiled Oil, 58 cents. The same commodity is often charged to other customers. That fact, and the reference to sperm oil in the list of items for Southwick’s long boat, to which we referred a few minutes ago, leads one to conjecture that 1825 was about the time when folks of the Kennebec Valley were changing from candles to oil lamps for illumination, just as three-quarters of a century later they changed from oil to electricity. Numerous items show his dealings in potash. In June, 1825 he makes several charges for pearl ash at 17 cents a pound. It was on July 6, 1824, apparently,that he bought this business from Daniel Marshall, whom he credits on that day with Potash Arch and Chimney, $24.00; three potash kettles, $112.50; one ladle, 50 cents; one’ spud, 25 cents; 7 1eaches, $21.00; two receivers, $1.50.
The keeper of this old book also dealt in dry goods. The mere names of the cloth that he sold make an interesting catalog: muslin, calico, dimity, cambric, gingham, diaper, sheeting, stripe, duck, devry, shirting, quality and “linen”. He sold lots of o1d time remedies; and that families often consumed these in quantity is revealed by an item of June 10, 1825, when he sold to Elijah Pope a bottle of castor oil for 84 cents. In 1825 84 cents would buy a lot of castor oil. It was Jacob Southwick, the village squire himself, who on June 3, 1825 bought a bottle of opodeldoc for 42 cents. An ounce of ipecac cost 50 cents, an ounce of nitre two cents, a bottle of oil of spruce 20 cents, a pound of logwood six cents.
In July it took a lot of liquid refreshment to get in the hay, and evidently the biggest crop was Jacob Southwick’s. Five times in that month are items, each of which reads, “Rum for haymakers”. It looks as if customers sometimes helped themselves to refreshment. How else should one interpret this item: “Aug. 8, 1825 — John Littlefie1d, 2 bottles Rum, taken and not charged the last two weeks, 44 cents”. This dealer managed to dispose of anything that came into his hands. In July, 1825 he made this charge: “Daniel Marshall, to damaged bacon delivered to Getchell, 22 cents”. He must have made many a shrewd bargain. In August, 1825 he paid John Gray $4.67 for making 14 pairs of shoes. In June he collected $1.50 from Benjamin Jacobs for “trip in boat to Hallowell”, where he apparently was going anyhow with a load of goods. But perhaps his neatest bargain had been a year earlier, in June, 1824 when on one day he sold Jacob Southwick a merino sheep for $3.50 and on the very next day sold him 3! lb. of Merino wool for $2.10. It is evident that he sheared the sheep before he delivered the animal to Southwick.
Year: 1951