Chapter VI · THE RIGHTS OF PURCHASERS

In any given community every person is directly or indirectly a purchaser. From birth to death choice is made for us or we ourselves choose objects of purchase daily, even hourly. As we do so, we help to decide, however unconsciously, how our fellow men shall spend their time in making what we buy. Few persons can give much in charity; giving a tithe is, perhaps, beyond the usual custom. But whatever our gifts may be, they are less decisive for the weal or woe of our fellow beings than are our habitual expenditures. For a man is largely what his work makes him—an artist, an artisan, a handicraftsman, a drudge, a sweater’s victim or, scarcely less to be pitied, a sweater. All these and many more classes of workers exist to supply the demand that is incarnate in their friends and fellow citizens, acting as the purchasing public. All of us, all the time, are deciding what industries shall survive, and under what conditions.

Obviously the purchaser ultimately decides all production, since any article must cease to be produced if consumers cease to purchase it. The horsehair furniture of the early part of the nineteenth century has now virtually ceased to be manufactured. On the other hand, any article, however injurious to human life and health the conditions of its production may be, or with whatsoever risk they may be attended, continues to be placed on the market so long as there is an effective demand for it; e. g., nitro-glycerine, phosphorous matches, and mine products of all kinds.

This great purchasing public, embracing the whole people, which ultimately decides everything, does so, on the whole, blindly, and in a manner injurious to itself, and particularly to that portion of itself which is engaged in production and distribution.

It would seem an obvious right of the purchaser that the food which he buys at the price asked should be pure and clean; that the garment purchased of an entirely reputable dealer should be free from poisonous dyes, vermin, and the germs of disease; and that both food and garments should leave his conscience free from participation in the employment of young children or of sweaters’ victims.

Yet these seemingly obvious rights were, perhaps, never farther from attainment than to-day, in the opening years of the twentieth century. Adulteration of foods has never, in the history of the human race, been carried on upon a scale so vast as at present. The sweating system with its inevitable accompaniment of filth and disease conveyed in the product, persists and increases in spite of sixty years of effort of the philanthropists and the needle-workers to check it.

The oldest recognized legal right of the purchaser is to have his goods as they are represented. To sell goods under false pretenses has long been an offense punishable with more or less severity. But of late this right, if it was ever widely enforceable, has become largely illusory. In the vast complications of modern production and distribution, conditions have arisen such that the individual purchaser at the moment of buying, cannot possibly ascertain for himself whether the representation of the seller is accurate or not. The rule caveat emptor fails when the purchaser is prevented by the nature of the case from exercising enlightened care. Thus in the case of adulterated foods, or of foods exposed to filth or disease in the course of preparation, and in the case of garments sewed in tenements, the purchaser is at the mercy of the producer and the distributer, and is debarred from exercising care in these respects at the moment of purchasing.

Not only may a department store advertise with impunity in a dozen daily newspapers that “all our goods are made in our own factory,” when it neither owns nor controls a factory, but the sales-clerks may safely reiterate the assurance over the counter in regard to an individual garment which, in truth, was finished in a tenement house by a bedridden consumptive. The machinery for identification is so imperfect, the difficulties in the way of tracing a garment are so many and so subtle, that the law has no more terrors for a mendacious sales-clerk than for the reckless advertising agent, or for the business office of those daily papers which thrive upon the wholesale mendacity of retail commerce.

Yet the demand for opportunity to obtain garments and food which may be purchased with a clear conscience grows imperative, has become, indeed, an ardent and abiding desire of enlightened purchasers who long for some trustworthy assurance that they are free from participation in the employment of children, in starvation wages and in the continuance of the sweating system. Granted that this new aspiration may be far from general, far from achieving its own gratification on any large scale, the mere fact that it is present in the minds of thousands of purchasers involves a new ethical standard on their part and must, in the course of time, bring fundamental changes throughout wide reaches of production and distribution.

The relation of this aspiration to certain legislation forms the subject of this and the ensuing chapter.

Ignorance of Conditions of Production.—The most serious obstacle to the realizing of this aspiration is the willing ignorance of the masses, particularly of the masses of women who constitute the direct purchasers of the largest portion of the articles used for personal consumption. Even the producers, themselves, suffer so keenly from the lack of intelligence of their customers, that they are fitting out museums for the purpose of educating them, the Commercial Museum of Philadelphia being a promising type of such undertakings.

Recognizing no duty in this matter, asserting no right, the unintelligent purchasers tempt the greed of producers and distributers. Devoid of enlightened imagination, these purchasers exert no stimulus favorable to the honest manufacturer.

Because the germs of the deadliest diseases are not discernible by the eye, because they have no conspicuous and offensive smell, a shopping public devoid of imagination remains easily unaware of their presence on the counters of reputable merchants. In the same way, ices and syrups colored in tints and shades unknown to the fruits and flowers of nature, arouse no imaginative wonder. Peas of brilliant green in January, corn taken as yellow from the can in March as from the ear in July, these impossible objects are credulously accepted by the buying multitude. Why? Because it prefers not to know the truth.

Because the purchasing public, on the whole, prefers at present not to know the facts, we are all in danger of eating aniline dyes in tomatoes, jams, jellies, candies, ices, fruit syrups, flavoring and coloring extracts; and salicylic acid in our canned peas and other vegetables which we insist upon having preserved of midsummer hue at midwinter. We wear more or less arsenic in our print goods and the germs of tuberculosis and of countless other diseases in our outer garments.

A physician who visits among the poorest of the poor in New York City recently found a woman in the last stages of consumption, making, as she lay propped among her pillows, little boxes for wedding cake, licking the edges to moisten the gum to make it hold together. The teacher of a class of defective children in the same city, while visiting the home of a lad whose left arm and right hand had been amputated by reason of cancerous growths, found the father suffering from tuberculosis, but making a trivial addition to the family income by cracking walnuts (for which he was paid seven cents a pound if no kernels were broken and three cents a pound if his work was imperfect). The father complained that he lost much time in fetching and carrying the nuts and kernels between the store and his home, and could crack but fifteen pounds in three days.

The individual purchaser would doubtless prefer to eat nuts cracked in a workroom not frequented by a father afflicted with tuberculosis and little son mutilated by the ravages of cancer. The individual has, however, at present no method of enforcing this reasonable preference.

We are all much in the position of the Italian immigrants in any of our great cities. They support at least one store for the sale of imported maccaroni, vermicelli, sausage (bologna and other sorts), olive oil, Chianti wine, and Italian cheese and chestnuts. These articles are all excessively costly, by reason of transportation charges and the import duties involved; but the Italians are accustomed to using them and prefer a less quantity of these kinds of food to a greater abundance of those cheaper and more accessible supplies by which they are surrounded. The pitiful result is that the importer buys the least quantity of the Italian produce requisite for the purpose of admixture with American adulterants. The most flagrant example of this is, perhaps, the use of Italian olive oil, of which virtually none really pure is placed upon the market for sale at retail. What the Italian immigrant gets is the familiar Italian label, the well-known package with its contents tasting more or less as it tasted at home in Italy. What the actual ingredients are he knows no more than an American knows what he is eating when he places his so-called butter or honey upon his so-called wheat-cakes. The demand of the Italians in America for Italian food-products, although large, persistent, and maintained at a heavy sacrifice on the part of the purchasers, is not an effective demand, because the immigrants have neither the knowledge nor the organization wherewith to enforce it, while the legislation of the various states affords them virtually no redress.

The privilege of remaining thus unintelligent costs the shopping public uncounted thousands of lives and other uncounted thousands of invalids. But it is a privilege dear to modern crowds. Indeed, the preference for things which come from afar, whose industrial history cannot be known to the purchasers, appears to be almost universal. Thus the writer has seen in a filthy hovel, in the grimiest street in Chicago, Sicilian peasant women sewing into the waistbands of the cheapest little knee pants, tags bearing the words New York, because the purchasers like the illusion that all garments sold in the United States are made in New York. The same illusion is cherished as to numerous food products—the purchaser will have it that they came from some other place than their real source. Figs from California must be labeled Smyrna; cotton seed oil from South Carolina must bear French or Italian labels calling it olive oil.

Why all these queer mendacities? Because the purchasing public will have it so! Because the number is still sadly small of those who perceive the duty to know their sources of supply and assert their right to know them; who are willing to sacrifice that deadly privilege of remaining ignorant, which the careless majority exercise at frightful cost of disease spread among innocent families, and of poverty, illness and death among the workers. The willingly ignorant purchaser carries a heavy share of the guilt of the exploiting manufacturer and the adulterating distributer.⁠[12]⁠

Some Typical Purchasers.—How inadequate is the individual demand of a single wide-awake customer, is well shown by the experience of a conscientious shopper of the writer’s acquaintance. Deeply moved by an eloquent appeal on behalf of the sweaters’ victims and their sufferings, she determined to free her own conscience by buying only goods made in factories and workrooms, never in home sweat-shops. She began her search for such goods in the leading department store in which she had always fitted out her boys for school. The sales-clerk assured her that, “All our goods are made in our own factory; we handle no sweatshop goods.” Being a canny person and well-instructed, she asked for a written assurance of that fact signed by a member of the firm, to be sent home with the goods. They were never sent, although this was an excellent customer whom the firm was in the habit of obliging if possible. This process she repeated in several stores and outfitting establishments, until it became clear to her mind that, alone and unaided, she could never free her individual conscience. The loneliness of this enlightened purchaser is one of the instructive phenomena of our times. The great, careless, thoughtless mass of American men and women have performed the act attributed to the ostrich. Hiding their minds in the pleasanter oblivion, they have pretended that the enemy was not present.

During the long period in which there had not yet been discovered a practicable method of dealing with the sweating system, many otherwise intelligent people deliberately adopted a policy of ignoring conditions which they saw no way of improving. Thus it was once the fortune of the writer to address a club of unusually influential women, on the conditions of work in the needle-trades in Chicago, as they existed during the smallpox epidemic of 1894. The story was a painful one of a disorganized trade, pauperism of skilled workers, destruction of home life in the tenements, incompetence in the Board of Health, filth, disease and death. The members listened with visible impatience. In the course of the discussion which followed one member said: “This club exists for the purpose of education and recreation. Listening to the recital this afternoon certainly cannot be regarded as recreation. Unless the speaker can offer a method by which we may participate in some practical effort for the improvement of conditions in the needle-trades, our way of spending this afternoon can have no claim to be regarded as education. For my part, I find it satisfactory to buy garments wherever I find them attractive, and then send them to the steam-cleaner.”

Manifestly this individualistic solution of the problem of the needle-trades was insufficient, even from the point of view of the speaker, for any ordinary cleaning of those days would certainly not have reached the germs of smallpox or of scarlet fever; and few persons share the willingness of that speaker to buy goods trusting to the efficacy of subsequent disinfection. Since, however, there was at that time no method available which could be offered to the critic, the writer was left defenseless. The community has borne both the risk of infection and the guilt of participation in maintaining the sweating system with sadly complete equanimity, far more amiably, indeed, than it has endured the painful process of enlightenment.

Among all the cherished forms of ignorance, none is more tenacious than that of the prosperous purchaser able and willing to pay for the best that the market affords and convinced that, whatever the sorrows of purchasers of ready-to-wear goods, he is safe, because he gets his garments only of the merchant tailor and pays a high price for the assurance that they are made up under conditions which guard him against disease, and enable the merchant tailor to pay the working tailor a fair price for his labor. But this customer is really no better off than the well-instructed club woman making her ineffectual search for righteously made ready-to-wear goods for her boys. For example, as factory inspector of Illinois, the writer was one day in search of a cigarmaker who was said to have smallpox in his family, during the terrible epidemic of 1894. Quite by accident a tailor was discovered newly moved into the suspected house, and not yet registered with the department or with the local board of health. In this tailor’s shop, which was his dwelling, there was a case of smallpox. In the same shop there was, also, a very good overcoat, such as gentlemen were paying from sixty to seventy dollars for in that year. In the collar was a hang-up strap bearing the name of a merchant tailor in Helena, Montana. Now, that merchant tailor had had, in his store window in Helena, excellent samples of cloth from which the customer had ordered his coat. The Helena tailor had taken the necessary measurements and had telegraphed them, together with the sample-number of the cloth, to the wholesale house in Chicago, of which he was an agent. The wholesaler had had the coat cut and had sent it to the kitchen-tailor in whose sickroom in an infected house in Chicago it was fortunately discovered. But for the happy accident of the finding of the tailor during a search for an entirely different person, the purchaser in Helena, Montana, would surely have bought smallpox germs in his expensive coat.

Beside this fatuous belief that his custom-work, because it is costly, is made under clean and wholesome conditions, the purchaser of expensive garments usually comforts his conscience with the assumption that the working tailor who makes them receives some substantial share of the high price in the form of wages. While it is true that the tailors who do custom work have a more stable trade union than workingmen in the ready-to-wear branches, and command, therefore, somewhat better pay, it is also true that the tailor in this case, as in scores of others during the same epidemic, was driven by extreme poverty to conceal the dreadful fact that he had smallpox in his family, through fear of losing a few days’ or a few weeks’ work. So the high price of the coat did not even entitle the customer in Helena, Montana, to an easy conscience on the score of the wages paid to the people who worked upon it.

In the matter of wages, however, there is no longer an available excuse for ignorance on the part of the purchaser as to the wages paid for the manufacture of his garments; and to-day, he who remains ignorant upon this important point does so by his own choice. For the tailors were already, at that time, offering a label attached to goods made under conditions of pay and of hours of work satisfactory to both the employer and the worker.

Efforts to Enlighten Purchasers.—Clearly the first step towards the assertion of the rights of the purchaser is the acquisition of knowledge; and it is an idiosyncrasy of the present industrial situation that a large part of the effort exerted for the enlightenment of purchasers has come, not from themselves, but from manufacturers, physicians and philanthropists (in the form of restrictions upon the sale of drugs, or recommendations in favor of municipally prepared vaccine, anti-toxine, etc.), from public authorities in the shape of official reports, from the Consumers’ League in its endeavor to form a large and stable body of organized purchasers, and finally and chiefly from the trade unions, disseminating information in the interest of better working conditions for themselves.

Among all these agencies, the press and the advertising merchants might be expected to appear. These have, however, little claim to any educational quality in their endeavor. Their exertions have been directed distinctly not toward education. Rather they have been meant to stimulate, to persuade, incite, entice, and induce the indifferent to purchase. Much of the current advertising, of which the patent medicine advertisement may be taken as the type, is aimed directly at the ignorance of the purchaser. Nearly all of it is aimed at the cupidity of the public and it, therefore, offers cheapness as the one great characteristic. It is immoral rather than ethical.

Such measures as exist for the inspection and testing of food products have usually been obtained either by hygienists and physicians for philanthropic purposes, or by producers who were furthering their own interests while nominally promoting those of the purchaser. Such is the requirement that oleomargarine shall be colored pink when offered for sale in certain states, nominally for the protection of consumers, who may not care whether the substance which they use for frying or for spreading on bread is made of the milk of the cow or the fat of the steer. The people who obtained the enactment of this law were not the outraged consumers of oleomargarine, demanding to be protected against it, but the farmers whose butter market was threatened by the invasion of the oleomargarine.

Similar protection to American purchasers of foreign food products is afforded by the federal bureau with its laboratories for the investigation of imported articles, nominally in the interest of the public health, but really in the interest of the American producer, whose adulterations are left by the federal government to the varying efficiency and honesty of local boards of health, and state chemists, and food and dairy commissions.

In consequence of these diverse and multifarious exertions on behalf of the purchasers, there have grown up regulations of strangely unequal effectiveness. Thus in many cities the sale of a small number of well-known deadly drugs is hedged about with precautions intended to prevent murder and suicide by the ancient method of poisoning. In some cases, the purchaser of such drugs must be identified, and must state the purpose for which the purchase is made. Arsenic and strychnine, having an old established reputation as possible enemies of human life, and but slight profit for the retailer in the quantities in which they are sold to individual purchasers, are surrounded by precautions; and the package may even have to be conspicuously labeled with skull and crossbones, so that no careless third party can unintentionally come to harm.

Meanwhile the milk sold by the grocer next door to the druggist may be conveying typhoid germs in every bottle, and his cream may be so thickened with corn-starch and other substances as to starve any baby depending upon it; or serve as a gradual poison to a diabetic patient conscientiously endeavoring to follow his prescribed diet of fats and to avoid starch in all its forms. The products of the dairy have an excellent reputation as bases of wholesome feeding for infants and invalids; the purchaser is not habitually on guard against them, as he is forewarned against the corner druggist’s arsenic and strychnia, nor has he any available means of personal self-defense. The typhoid germ and the thickening substance added to his cream and milk he cannot discover for himself at will. He must take his chances of protection through the intelligence and faithfulness of the municipal officials who deal with the milk supply. The constant appalling death rate of infants who depend upon milk, in all great cities, demonstrates the insufficiency of this agency, under present conditions.

Only the intelligent farmer, managing his own dairy, or the coöperative society owning its dairies and buying its own product, can be certain of avoiding poisons, quite as dangerous to life and health as strychnia and arsenic, with which American society has not yet learned to deal by any effective summary procedure. The experience of some of the English cities, and of Rochester, New York, seems to indicate that the difficulties of the milk supply can be met only by the institution of municipal milk, analogous to the municipal water supply; and municipal provision of all useful drugs, analogous to the present municipal supplies of vaccine and anti-toxine serum.

On the other side from the dairyman, the druggist’s next door neighbor, perhaps, is a tailor, who may be actively engaged in poisoning society in yet a different manner, by the sale of garments made in places in which there is infectious disease transmissible in articles exposed to it. In this case, also, as in the case of the dairyman’s milk, the customer is at the mercy of the community and its officials. For when he orders a suit, it is out of his power to sit in the tailor’s shop while the garment is cut, and then follow it whithersoever the merchant tailor may send it, first to a workshop to be stitched, afterward to a second place in which the buttonholes may be made, and then to a third place, commonly a tenement-dwelling, in which the vest and trousers are felled and otherwise completed before the garment is sent back to the tailor for the removal of whatever grease and vermin it may have acquired in its travels. For the tailor, as for the dairyman, there has never yet been brought to bear any precautionary measure adequately protective for the customer.

Scarcely more availing than the restrictions upon strychnia and arsenic in the wilderness of modern retail trade, are the efforts of the public officials to protect the purchasing public by the dissemination of information. The Department of Labor at Washington, the state bureaus of labor, the state inspectors of factories, the municipal and state boards of health, the state chemists and dairy commissions, all publish annually or biennially (some of them quarterly, monthly, and weekly) information for the enlightenment of the citizens. But very little of this information has, hitherto, served the purpose of the individual purchaser. If I have read the reports of all these officers, I am not only in as great danger as before of buying glucose for sugar, acetic acid for vinegar, and paper in the soles of my shoes; but I am in as great danger as before of buying smallpox, measles, scarlet fever, infectious sore eyes and a dozen forms of disease of the skin in my new garments. For not one of these officials publishes the list of the kitchen-tailors to whom the merchant tailor gives his goods to be made up; just as not one of them can possibly give information whereby adulterations of foods can be successfully detected in the private kitchen.

On the other hand, the available official information already existing has hitherto remained largely ineffectual. In vain has the fact been printed that a certain bouillon (so extensively advertised as particularly delicate and suitable for the use of aged persons and little children) is boiled in such close proximity to the fertilizer storage of the packing establishment that the factory inspectors fall ill on the days of inspection of these premises. The bouillon continues to be served at the luncheons of the socially aspiring. Official statements on all these matters, safely buried in official reports, do not reach and influence the great mass of the buyers.

For many generations manufacturers have been offering to their patrons the guarantee of the brand, whereby the producer stakes his reputation upon the excellence of the article bearing his name or device. But the public attaches such slight importance to this guarantee that, at present, many factories send out more goods without the brand than with it, not wishing to shoulder the discredit incident to their cheapest and most worthless product, which yet proves the more profitable portion of the total output.

The difficulties of the manufacturers in their efforts to enlighten purchasers are greatly intensified by the extraordinary incompetence of the “average” purchaser to judge articles on their merits. For certain great modern industries men have devised tests for the product, and warships, locomotives, railway bridges, and electrical installations can all be tried and tested before the bills are paid. But for the bulk of the products intended for personal use, nothing effective has been designed corresponding to these tests. Especially is this true of all those branches of manufacture which were once carried on by women in the home, and have now gone out into shops and factories. Concerning these products, purchasers must still rely upon their individual skill as buyers. The old rule caveat emptor is here carried out to its utmost application.

The most promising step forward in the effort to educate the purchasing public has been taken whenever a state has required the manufacturer of an article of food or medicine to state clearly and truthfully the ingredients composing each package offered for sale. This is a direct appeal to the intelligence of the purchasing public. Such measures become effective just in proportion as the purchasers coöperate with the officials who are charged with the duty of testing and analyzing samples bought in the ordinary course of trade. A community in which this coöperation is well sustained protects the life and health of its citizens, stimulates their intelligence in a direction of ever-increasing industrial importance, and enforces honesty upon producers who are under the heaviest moral strain when left unsustained under the pressure of competition.

The same principle underlies a bill entitled “An Act for Preventing the Adulteration or Misbranding of Foods or Drugs, and for Regulating Traffic Therein,” which has twice passed the House of Representatives only to fail each time of passage by the Senate. This is the attempted application of the principle that the purchaser is of right entitled to trustworthy information furnished by the producer and guaranteed by the ceaseless activity of officials created for the purpose of examining the products and testing the veracity of the labels attached to them.

By providing for a continuous appeal to the intelligence of the individual purchaser, and an ever present warning to the producer to tell the truth as to his product, this bill⁠[13] promises an important ethical gain through legislation.

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