MOVING THE FACTORY BACK TO THE LAND
By Walter Willard

Though its present form does not betray its origin, the factory was born in the green country, on the banks of singing streams fringed with willows, elms and alders. The pleasant valleys of Lancashire, of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire cradled the monster. In them was first heard the cry of little children, of boys and girls drafted from orphanages and workhouses to tend the new spinning and weaving machines invented by Wyalt, Hargreaves, Arkwright. Meek and lowly were the factors that fathered the industrial Moloch. Patient British sheep furnished the raw material; young, tender, cheap fingers tended spindle and loom; up and down the country, whenever the power of falling water was available, wool was transformed into yarn, and yarn into cloth. Thus bucolically was laid the foundation of England's textile trade, of modern mechanical industry with its long train of complicated problems.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century England had but one city with a population exceeding a hundred thousand souls. As yet the centralization of industry had barely begun. The power of steam, ready for work wherever coal and water met, was just starting to draw the "mills" from the waterfalls of the open country into the cities.

In 1864 the English Privy Council, alarmed by the horrible congestion, ordered a medical investigation of the housing conditions in the industrial centers. Said Dr. Simon (Eighth Report on Public Health, London, 1866) summing up the results of the investigation: "In its higher degrees it (overcrowding) almost necessarily involves such negation of all delicacy, such unclean confusion of bodies and bodily functions, such exposure of animal and sexual nakedness as is rather bestial than human- - - To children who are born under its curse it must be a very baptism into infamy. And beyond all measure hopeless is the wish that persons thus circumstanced should ever in other respects aspire to that atmosphere of civilization which has its source in physical and moral cleanliness."

Pretty picture, isn't it? It was not overdrawn. In its general tenor, in its detailed instances, this old report reads suspiciously like the published findings of modern investigators who have waded through the tenements of the industrial centers in the New World. Nor was the misery of thee factory operatives unknown before medical men raised their voices in protest. Eighty years ago Robert Owen tried to improve the condition of the cotton mill "hands", tried to give them a modicum of light, air and privacy in their dwellings.

Owen's experiments failed. Pullman's effort to idealize factory work went to smash. The rock of paternalism crushed the bottom of both well-meant enterprises. In Pullman the employing corporation retained title to all land and buildings, became landlord besides employer. Though it provided sanitary, well-built accommodations at low rents, the workers resented paternal interference in their domestic affairs. At Gary, The saloon assumed the reins of power.

Despite the failure of these experiments, the factory is slowly, very slowly, beginning to move back to its birthplace, the green country. But this trend is no longer based upon benevolent, paternal motives. The owner is transplanting the workshop for the benefit of his own purse. Self-interest is at the bottom of the movement that is pushing steel mills,electric-appliance plants, publishing houses and packing establishments out of the large cities into the suburbs or the country.

Here is one instance of the profit that lies in the back-to-the-land movement of the factory:

Twenty years ago a California oil company built a small repair shop close to the wells. Ten years ago the expansion of the oil business necessitated the removal of the shop to Los Angeles, to a site so large that a portion of the land was sold as superfluous, bringing six thousand dollars. Within a few years this land had to be bought back - for thirty thousand dollars. Instead of repairing, the concern was now manufacturing pumps, drills, well supplies and tools. Though land had risen to fifty thousand dollars an acre, a dollar a square foot, in the industrial district, more of it was bought to house the expanding works. Still more room was needed. Part of the four hundred mechanics had to work by artificial light all day. In three years land values doubled, jumped from one dollar to two dollars an acre. It would be mighty expensive to provide the needed additional space. On Manhattan island rising land values forced the factory into the sky, superimposed one shop upon the other, created the fifteen-story "loft" buildings whose armies of workers were jammed into endless rows of dreary tenements, crowded more closely than the ranks of the blessed on the sunny swales of paradise. In every large city like-wise; exorbitant land values accompanied by the crowding of factories and their workers into a space too small for the needs of both, has been increasing the fixed charges of both owner ad worker and decreasing the output. Just how large this excess of cost can become was made apparent when the directors of the Los Angeles tool plant called for an estimate of the savings possible in a new plant on ample ground. The management decided that a rearrangement of the works on a plot amble for all present and future needs would reduce the cost of production eighteen per cent and increase the output twenty per cent with the same pay-roll.

These figures filled the directors with back-to-the-land enthusiasm.

This tool plant was neither the first nor the largest shop to leave an American city of great size. Its move was not unique on the industrial checker-board, but the manner of the move contains valuable hints and suggestions to those contemplating a similar exodus. From the owners of an old Spanish grant comprising some thirty square miles between Los Angeles and tidewater the backers of the enterprise acquired thirty-five hundred acres, gave twenty-five acres to the Pacific Electric railway, a system which daily operates more electric trains than any other interurban railway in the country, provided the shops of the company, employing a thousand men, would be moved from Los Angeles to the new industrial tract. After adding more iron works, a varnish factory, a shoe factory and other plants to the nucleus, the directors proceeded to lay out the industrial town-to-be.

Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr., of Boston, is perhaps the foremost landscape architect of the country. Millions of exposition visitors have seen and admired his work. Olmstead laid out the new industrial community. On the broad empty cornfield he traced the lines of streets and boulevards, marked the limits of the business district, placed the industrial sites in the lee of the town, away from the prevailing westerly breeze, chose a knoll for the civic center, designated the sites of the city hall, library, auditorium and other public buildings, backed his civic center with a thirty-acre park and, fixing his eyes firmly upon the white peak of Mt. San Antonio at the horizon, laid out a broad boulevard straight through the business center toward the snowy crest. He devised winding contour streets and straight ones, provided diagonals, chose the trees, palms and shrubs for the parking spaces and told the engineer to go ahead. H.H. Sinclair, the chief, did go ahead, whipped the Olmstead plans into practical shape and broke the record for speedy, thorough construction.

If it is the foremost duty of the first-class engineer, as one member of the profession put it, to be able to explain convincingly why the owner should put up more money, the building of the town of Torrance required talent of the highest order. "It doesn't show" lamented Bennett, the supervising engineer. "We ask for another hundred thousand, get it and immediately proceed to bury the money where the good work can't be seen. There isn't an inch of the sewer or water system in sight, and yet we're proud of the job. The concrete culverts are all covered, the light and power wires run in conduits underneath the street crossings, the heavy base beneath the asphalt and oiled macadam surface is hidden. For all the money we've spent we have nothing to show but nine miles of asphalt and macadam, curbs and cement sidewalk. give me the heavy, rough work where a fifty-thousand-dollar cut, fill or dam looms up like a boy's sore thumb."

Torrance is a business proposition, but it differs from all other industrial projects in this: the well-being of the worker has at last been clearly recognized as the source of the largest, most permanent profit, and to the enhancement of this well-being has been given the best thought of J.H. Torrance, father of the project. This industrial city was to be the crowning achievement of a long career filled with constructive effort. It was to prove that a worker decently, pleasantly housed upon an ample plot of ground of his own increases in efficiency and contentment, that these qualities are most important industrial assets and that their growth could be stimulated by laying the groundwork of a model city. To this end the individual home was fostered by him and protected by prohibiting the erection of any structure save private dwelling in the residence districts, by a complete separation of business houses from the home neighborhoods, by setting aside certain areas for livery stables, lumber yards, blacksmith shops and similar unsightly plants, by preventing the encroachment of the industrial zone upon the dwellings and by strict regulations, running with the land, against the manufacture or sale of intoxicants. In addition, Torrance gave the individual home site a minimum width of forty feet, width a depth of a hundred and forty feet. Consider this fact. Chicago, with the Mississippi as the ultimate limit of expansion, cut its acres into strips twenty-five feet wide and rarely more than a hundred feet deep; St. Louis, New York, Cleveland used the same dimensions; there is scarcely one Eastern city which differs from this narrow-chested standard, except Baltimore, where an eighteen-foot front was considered sufficient. Few cities average more than three thousand square feet per home site; in Torrance twice that area is the minimum. To guard against possible race antagonism, the sale or rental of residence property to non-Caucasians was restricted to special foreign quarters, and no building was allowed to go up unless the plans had first been submitted to the owner's architect.

These conditions and restrictions contemplate the sale, not the rental, of all the land in the town-site that may be required. From the experience of other model industrial cities the owners learned that paternal landlordism, no matter how pure and high its motive, is diametrically opposed to those principles of a democracy which give every man the right to grow dandelions or bluegrass in his own front yard at his own sweet will. To start the town right was the sole aim of the owners. Once the start was made, as soon as the wisdom of the restrictions had been fully comprehended by the population, all the restrictions and conditions thrown about the use of the land were to cease--except the liquor prohibition--to be renewed, altered, amended or discarded at the pleasure of the property owners.

Still, these elaborate safeguards thrown about the character of the town-to-be did not solve the actual housing problem. Nor did the founder of Torrance attempt a complete solution. He was content to blaze the trail, to demonstrate by actual example that the modest, very inexpensive home can be made both esthetically satisfying and immensely practical. he chose Irving J. Gill as the official trail-blazer.

Among architects Gill is a secessionist, a heretic, a dissenter who rears and snorts when he sees a venerable, hoary standard of the profession come down the street. He has convictions both artistic and practical, and he carries them out with a zest that makes the average builder scream with terror. He is the architectural apostle of the simple life. Be it a mansion, a railway station or a humble home, he pares and prunes, leaves off and removes conventional features until essentials only are left.

"Ninety-nine per cent of architectural ornamentation expresses, not art, but the fear to leave it off" he declares, right out loud. He is not afraid. Look at the Pacific Electric station;look at the bank, the office and store buildings he designed for Torrance. Not a square inch of decoration is visible on the white walls. In the severe, straight lines, in the oft-recurring, effectively used squares, cubes and half-circles, in the broad,smooth surfaces there is dignity, strength, harmony without the least attempt at conventional decoration.

"Let Nature supply the contrast" he urges. "Nature never makes two trees, two leaves, two forms exactly alike. Don't try to imitate Nature with machine-made stuff. The result is depressingly monotonous in its rigidly regular irregularity. Dare to be simple, regular, rely upon Nature to supply the irregular contrast.

"The average mother of the working class spends ninety per cent of her time between four walls, a floor and a ceiling" he asserted earnestly. "If you want to raise standards and ideals, start with the mother. Work upon her through her surroundings. To influence her morally, esthetically, physically, change the character of the home. They won't stand for it? Let me tell you something. These ideas were first carried out in the kitchens of rich men's homes. The floor was built of cement. No, it wasn't cold. It was cool in the summer and warm in winter. We left off the baseboard, picture molding, plate rail, ceiling beams, built window and door frames flush with the wall, eliminated every crevice and projection that would catch dust and dirt, that would require labor for its proper maintenance.

"Did the colored cooks and housemaids appreciate this labor-saving, dignified simplicity? Well, they came and asked me to design them a church as simple as their kitchens!"

Here is a "model" house of four rooms that cost fourteen hundred dollars to build. The partition walls are thin, but practically fireproof, consisting of nearly solid plaster on a frame work of studs and lath. The floor, likewise, is fireproof. Cement is the material used. Oiled and waxed, it resembles a polished hardwood floor, lasts forever and is easily cleaned. Metal-framed casement windows and glass-paneled outside doors, set flush with the walls, are used in every house. Neither baseboard, panels, moldings, imitation beams nor any other purely ornamental devices are visible. Almost monastic in their austere simplicity, the wide, unbroken wall spaces in their neutral tints proclaim peace, restful quiet.

A living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a neat shed in the rear of the lot comprise the fourteen-hundred dollar establishment. The house , of course, is connected with the sewer; it has electric light in every room; above the enameled tub a gas heater provides hot water for the bath, the sink and the stationary wash tub in the kitchen. Flour bins, kitchen cabinets, shelves, racks, air-cooling compartments and other labor-saving devices for the kitchen have been supplied. From floor to ceiling kitchen and bathroom are coated with heavy white enamel. When a green lawn, masses of shrubs and flowering vines are added, the picture of this inexpensive, sanitary and yet beautiful workman's home becomes quite alluring. One is shown on page 301 (coming soon, ed.).

But the workers were in no hurry to buy these model houses. They went through them, wide-eyed, mute, went out again and made the first payment on a conventional bungalow with three ten-ton cobblestone pillars proudly supporting the featherweight roof of the front porch. Which fact emphasizes the wisdom of coercing no one to buy or rent an esthetic home. This wisdom the founders of Torrance possessed. They forced the uplift pill down no unwilling throat. Within the limits of the general restrictions individual taste and preference were allowed freely to seek their own level. But the model dwellings are there, scattered among the other houses, creating talk, comparisons, removing prejudice against the innovations. Their novel features of construction, appearance and grouping are working silently every day, even if their merit dawns but slowly upon those for whom they were primarily designed.

The tide of industrial centralization that began more than a hundred years ago seems to have reached its highest point. Apparently the recent scientific investigation of the factors that make for efficiency is bearing fruit, starting a counter-current, bringing about a division of huge industrial enterprises into smaller autonomous units, causing the factory to start on its return pilgrimage to the country. If this movement of industry from the city to the country should attain large proportions, the example of Torrance will be most valuable. Not only will it help to solve the problem of inducing the best workers to trek along to the smaller industrial centers by holding out better conditions of living as an inducement, but the methods of building up Torrance also go to prove that these improved conditions can be supplied at profit both to the landowner, the employer the worker and the community.