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WESTERN COMMENT
Is Individualism King?
REVIEW OFFICE, CHICAGO, I I I . , OCTOBER 29,
1928.
week the American Iron & Steel Institute held its annual meet-
ing at New York, and the address of the president was read, as is
usual, before some 1,500 of the leaders of the
Schwab
great steel industry. It is the custom, so I am
* n
told, for the vast majority of the members to per-
Schelhng
form the ceremony known as ducking the meet-
ing as soon as the presidential pronouncement has gone forth; but
this time the event was different. The president, Charles M.
Schwab, who is a music lover unashamed, had a secret stunt ready
for his hearers and he insisted that they stay. In consequence,
when the first of the technical papers following his address, was
started, it turned out that the subject to be discussed was none other
than the relation of the American steel industry to the American
piano business! A grand piano, a mass of acoustical apparatus of
various strange looking types, pictures of sound waves thrown on a
screen and so on informed the steel men of the country that ton-
nage, business conditions, price wars and tariffs are not their only
concern, but that the United States Steel Corp. at any rate finds
time to busy itself with such airy trifles as the tonal value of pianos
and the difference between a steel string giving out only a funda-
mental tone and another emitting a mass of partial tones without
any fundamentals at all. And, then, when the paper was finished
and Ernest Schelling, at Mr. Schwab's invitation, sat down to the
piano and for ten minutes played Chopin to the hard-boiled bosses
of rolling mills and of blast furnaces, one could have heard a pin
drop all over the vast ballroom of the Commodore Hotel. Truly,
the piano industry of the United States has been moving in high
financial company. Truly, too, that day was achieved something in
the way of publicity for the piano industry, which even the New
York daily papers thought worthy of notice. For the first time in
history a convention of steel men was held up in its orderly program
while its relation to music and musical instruments was explained,
and while a great artist brought out lovely sounds from the
stretched steel wires, made by some of those steel men, of a mag-
nificent piano. It was an occasion worthy rather more than pass-
ing attention and a few observations on its implications will not
here be out of place.
LAST
paper on piano tone research and to the lovely music that flowed
from Ernest Schelling's fingers have in their homes fine grand
pianos. Certainly, if their behavior during this so unexpected in-
trusion of art into a business convention counts for anything, music
speaks to the vast majority of them with no uncertain voice. To
them the idea of a piano business talking as if it were down and
out, or at least lingering on the count of the eighth second, seemed
frankly absurd.
Now, if one contrasts the personnel of our industry with the per-
sonnel of the great basic industry like that of steel, the differences
to be observed are far more superficial than they
We
are profound. From the platform of the hall at
Have
the meeting of the Iron & Steel Institute that
Men
morning could be seen the faces of piano men like
Henry Ziegler, Theodore Steinway, Harry Sohmer, E. S. Werolin,
Charles Fuller Stoddard, and many others, who sat as invited
guests. Each one of these men is in his particular field of the in-
dustry a true leader, whether in executive management, in technical
achievement, in research, or in organizing. Each of them could just
as well have been a leader of the steel or of any other industry.
Nor is the piano business lacking in brains at any of its centers.
Men like Herbert Simpson, of the Kohler Industries, like Rice of
Kurtzmann & Co., like Bradford Edmunds of Boston, like Cava-
naugh of East Rochester, like Axel Gulbransen, like George J.
Dowling, like Farny Wurlitzer, like Albert Bond, like Willard Van
Matre, like Erwin Bartlett, are not devoid of executive, technical or
organizing brains. They know their field, they have given their
lives to its cultivation, and they have built up strong and enduring
business structures which now are standing rocklike through the
tempests of the hour. Put those men among the crowd of steel
leaders and they will look the part; for they, too, are big men. An
industry dominated and led by men so individually strong certainly
ought not to be, certainly cannot in reality be, a weak, failing in-
dustry. And it is not.
BUT it has a weakness. That weakness is.to be found in this, that
the men are strong, wise and skilled individuals, but that they lack
a sense of community. It is true that in every
But
industry the sense of individualism outweighs all
THE engineer who read the paper said of the American piano busi-
°
.
sense of communal interest. Even in the steel in-
ness that it is a "hundred-million-dollar-a-year" business. He meant
Commumty
. . .
., . rr .
.
,
of course that in a normal year the value of the
dustry competition is terribly efficient. A good
Looking
pianos turned out is not less than this large sum.
From
part of Mr. Schwab's presidential address the other day was taken
Such an industry is respectable and worthy of at-
Outside
up with an appeal to the members of the Institute to refrain from
tention, even among steel men. When, therefore,
disastrous price-cutting. He had the nerve (for nerve was needed )
the question is considered; why is the piano business going through
to say frankly that if he had his way he would stop all addition to
a,phase of depression?, the answer must take into account the fact
plant and equipment for at least a year, seeing that the steel business
that it is a large, respectable, old-established and economically im-
has already too much equipment, too much producing power for
portant industry which is in this condition. During this very meet-
its market. It sounded almost like the head of the Piano Manu-
ing of the Iron & Steel Institute, at which so dramatically the
facturers' Association talking to his members! Yet it is probable
phenomena and the fortunes of the piano industry were introduced
that Mr. Schwab's words will be heeded, for the steel men are com-
on the stage of high-light publicity, the question was asked a hun-
pelled, by the nature of their industry, to realize always a certain
dred times by individual members who had heard the paper and the
strong sense of brotherhood and community. Now it is just this
music: "What, then, is the matter with the piano industry? I did
sense of community which, so it seems to me, our industry lacks.
not know it was in a depressed state. I always thought of a piano
Piano making has indeed grown to its present proportions as an art
as a necessity. There's plenty of money in the country. Why don't
and a business partly because of its jealous individualism, because,
the piano men wake up? What's the matter with them?" And
in fact, of its insistence upon the beauty and the strength of indi-
many other questions of like content. In a word, the distresses of
vidual craftsmanship. But it is absurd to make individualism the
our industry are hardly comprehensible by persons outside it who
foundation stone of an industry which at the same time insists that
look at the product only from an outside point of view, but who,
it is so well established as to be technically standardized and really
at the same time, sense clearly its social importance and its position
incapable of improvement. If the latter belief be correct, then the
as a generally acknowledged necessity to the cultured home. Prob-
ably nine-tenths <>\ the men who sat in that hall listening to the industry can properly get together and lose the last traces of an in-
dividualism which, by hypothesis, no longer has any meaning.
10