By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, April 28, 1945.
“How long have we got?” demanded Jimmie Frise feverishly.
He was putting the finishing touches on this week’s Birdseye Center cartoon. We were in his den, at home, where he works when he is badly behind schedule.
“We have,” I said, sternly consulting my watch, “one hour and 22 minutes.”
“I’ll make it,” he said, scratching furiously at the paper.
“Well, you know the consequences,” I informed him grimly. “You heard what the editors said.”
“Editors,” said Jim, “have grown very industrial lately. You would think it was shirts they were manufacturing, instead of newspapers.”
“Publishing,” I enunciated, “is an industry. And as such, it must keep up to date.”
“In the old days,” mused Jim, as he scratched, “men plowed with a hand plow and a team of horses. Now they use a gang plow1 behind a giant tractor. In the old days, men set type by hand and got newspapers out in such a leisurely manner that they would run off a couple of dozen, walk down to the hotel with them, let the boys look them over. And if there was nothing to complain of, why, the editor would have a couple more beers, walk back up to the plant and run off the rest of the edition.”
“Well,” I retorted, “you speak of tractors and plowing. You can’t deny that we are getting far better produce from the land than we did in former days. Why, there is hardly an agricultural item you can name that hasn’t been improved almost out of recognition.”
“Yep,” said Jim. “And more starving people in the world today than in all history.”
“There’s no connection,” I protested.
“There must be a connection,” said Jimmie. “There is always a connection. And it is finding the connection that is the biggest job in the world today. I think we should go back to the old way of producing newspapers. And only get one out when there is something new to report.”
“Huh,” I scoffed, “as if there isn’t plenty to report these days! Why, there is a regular avalanche of news.”
“What about?” inquired Jim mildly.
I didn’t even answer. I just looked at him, hunched over the drawing board.
“You mean the war?” inquired Jim, absently. “That isn’t new. That’s so old, everybody is tired of it. The war news ought to be cut down to a little paragraph. In fact, you might stick a little one-sentence paragraph up in the other corner from the weather probabilities. Something like: ‘Advance today 17 miles. Nine towns captured.'”
“And what would you fill up the rest of the paper with?” I inquired.
“News,” said Jim. “New stuff. Interviews with the greatest minds on earth about how we are going to work out real friendship between, say, America and Russia. Big stories on how we Canadians can get really interested in the Chinese people, in place of our present attitude, which is sort of like our interest in birds or butterflies.”
“Puh,” I said, “Who’d read that?”
“There you have it,” agreed Jimmie. “Newspapers always give the people what they want. In the old days, the newspapers gave the people serious arguments on public questions. The press was a sort of debating society. It was what the public wanted. When a man was plowing, behind a team of horses, plodding slowly over the fields, he wanted something to mull over in his mind. He didn’t want exciting, agitating news and sensations. He wanted something to ponder. Today, a man driving a gang plow tractor doesn’t want anything to ponder. He can’t ponder. How the heck could a man ponder, sitting up on the seat of a big roaring tractor yanking gang plows?”
“Get on with your drawing,” I warned, looking at my watch.
“Okay,” said Jim. “You talk. You tell me about all this Dumbarton Oaks2 business and Bretton Woods3.”
All About Depreciation
“Ah,” I said. “You have me there. That’s like asking me to explain the Einstein Theory. Only a few men in the world can understand these big international things.”
“Aha,” said Jim. “Maybe our plow-pushing grandfathers could, though.”
“Naturally,” I admitted. “Back in the pondering days.”
“Well, give me a sort of nutshell description of Bretton Woods,” suggested Jim, industriously scratching. “Put it in a few words. It’s about the gold standard, isn’t it?”
“To tell you the truth, Jim,” I confessed, “I don’t actually know. World politics isn’t as simple as religion. You can put the Christian religion into a nutshell by quoting the Golden Rule. But there are over 400 Christian sects. You can’t put world politics into even a Golden Rule4. So you can imagine how many sects there must be in world politics.”
“Well, suppose Bretton Woods is about the gold standard,” pursued Jimmie, “what is the gold standard?”
“Just concentrate on your drawing,” I suggested firmly.
“Gold standard,” persisted Jim.
“Well,” I began carefully, “you know about depreciation, don’t you?”
“Yes,” said Jim, “depreciation is the fact that all property depreciates. You build a house, and it begins to depreciate the day you move in. Buy a new car, and it depreciates $500 as you sign the paper.”
“Exactly,” I explained. “One of the most distressing things about property of all kinds Is that it depreciates. This has worried mankind for countless ages. From the beginning of time. Our best brains have worn themselves out, across the centuries, trying to figure some way they could produce property that would not depreciate. A farmer toils all year to grow a crop. All the time he is working on it, his implements are depreciating. His horses are depreciating. His land is depreciating. He’s depreciating himself. His house, his barn, his pump, everything is depreciating in the process of producing a crop.”
“I can see that,” said Jim.
“Now, in olden days,” said I, “the farmer produced wheat in order to use some of it himself, but also to trade with the next farmer for the pork or hay that the other farmer produced. But everything he got, in exchange for what he produced, was perishable. The world was full of depreciation.”
“Everything perishes,” agreed Jim.
“But,” I clinched, “among men were a certain percentage, a small percentage, who weren’t content with that fact. They didn’t like the idea of everything depreciating and perishing. So they invented gold.”
“Aha,” said Jim.
“They explained to all the common people, the people who know in their hearts that everything perishes, and are content with that knowledge, I pursued, “that gold was a medium of exchange, only. To save time. To make it easy for people to deal in goods with one another, even at some distance.”
“It does do that,” admitted Jim.
“But its real and wicked characteristic,” I summed up, “was that it did not perish. It I did not depreciate. For crafty and greedy men who were smart at producing things, who by reason of their brains and industry, were able to produce far more than they needed, it was a way of preserving property right in the face of the one eternal natural law – that all things depreciate and perish.”
“So that’s gold?” cried Jim.
“The funny part of it is,” I explained, “the men who know and talk most about depreciation – industrialists and factory owners – are the busiest at trying to collect the largest amount of the one thing on earth that doesn’t depreciate – gold.”
“It’s the old dream of eternity,” said Jim. “Everybody trying to convert the perishable into the eternal.”
“It’s worse than that,” I checked. “While the mass of mankind is allowed only the perishable; while depreciation of everything they own, including their lives, is the very driving force of their lives, a small element of mankind – the smart, the clever and the hard-working – have kidded all mankind into agreeing that one thing is eternal – gold. Then let the poor man get it – if he can!”
“What devils,” cried Jimmie, “the clever people of the world are!”
“Not at all,” I assured him. “Clever people don’t understand about Bretton Woods any more than we do. They don’t even understand about gold. Most of them never see gold from one year’s end to the other, except in the ornaments they buy their wives. Gold got too clumsy to hoard. So they invented paper dollars. Paper dollars got too clumsy, so they invented bank accounts and stock markets. Now a man collects gold on his cuff. All he needs in his pocket is a dollar and a half in change.”
“The clever be damned,” said Jimmie, “they don’t even understand their cleverness.” And he gave a few final flourishes with his pen, unpinned the drawing and waved it in the air to dry it. “How long have we got now?” he demanded.
“Forty-three minutes,” I announced, startled. “Jim, we’ll have to hustle.”
“If we make good connections,” said Jim, racing into his coat, “we’ll have plenty of time. Six minutes to walk to the bus, 30 minutes on bus and street car…”
I led to the door, and very briskly we set off up the street and along the three blocks to the bus stop.
“Everything under control,” cried Jimmie. “There’s the bus just coming.”
And we hastened our steps and arrived at the bus stop exactly as the bus wheezed its brakes and drew up at the corner.
“Now we’ll make it right on the dot,” I said, as we started to swing aboard. “Thirty minutes exactly.”
A car horn tooted very brief and friendly.
A voice sang out –
“Can’t I give you a lift?”
And a fine looking car, with a fine looking gentleman leaning out the window, inched closer.
Jim pushed back and we waved to the bus driver.
“Thanks very much,” cried Jimmie, opening the car door.
“I saw you gentlemen hustling to catch the bus,” said the stranger genially, “and I figured you might be in a hurry.”
“We are, as a matter of fact,” I admitted, slamming the car door. “My friend here has an ‘or else’ situation on his hands. His boss told him that if he didn’t get his work down by a certain hour, the boss would take steps that would astonish us.”
As we sailed smoothly past the bus and speeded down towards the main highway to downtown, the stranger took us in with friendly but slightly amused glances.
“You must have a tough boss,” he said. “What’s your work?”
“He’s an artist,” I explained. “I’m a writer.”
“Well, well,” said the stranger, with the amused air of a gent who has accidentally picked up a couple of circus freaks.
“Yep,” said Jimmie, clutching his portfolio.
We whammed to the main corner and turned on to the main drag. Our driver was a business man who drove with that large, easy confidence.
“We’ll have a good 10 minutes to spare,” I said to Jim, showing him my watch. “We can pose around the editor’s door ostentatiously for 10 minutes and just show him.”
“I’ve got one call to make,” said the stranger. “It won’t take a minute. Where do you go?”
“To the Star Building.” I said anxiously.
“Within a block of where I park,” said the, business man.
He then announced the line of business he was in, explained that he was the executive manager and gave us a few brief biographical outlines of just who he was. He said any time we wanted an interesting story about Canadian business, we ought to look him up.
But we still stuck to the main downtown route, and at a good pace, and every block. we travelled, I felt easier.
Just One Call
All of a sudden, at Spadina Ave., he swerved the car south on to the old street.
“I’ve a brief call to make down here,” he said, “have to see a man about an order that has gone astray. Won’t be two minutes.”
Off into a dingy side street he turned, one of those old streets with churches converted into garages and old rough-cast houses used as storage places for unsightly merchandise of one kind and another.
Along this street, amid battered old trucks, he wound and wove his way, at a slow pace, until we turned into even a narrower and more dilapidated street, a blind street, cluttered with decrepit traffic of truck and horse-drawn wagon.
He drew up before a ramshackle factory of weathered planks.
“I’ll just be a couple of minutes,” he said cheerfully.
And he swung out and ran athletically up the steps and into the joint.
“I don’t like this, Jim,” I said. “We’re a good five minutes’ walk back to Spadina. And we’d have to transfer off Spadina and along King…”
“Why did we accept the lift?” groaned Jim bitterly. “We caught that bus just in the nick of time. It would have given us perfect connections, with time to spare…”
“We’ve got 16 minutes yet,” I said. “In this car we could make the office in about eight minutes.”
We sat forward and stared at the door of the drab factory.
“Big business executive,” I sneered.
“Well, he tried to do us a favor,” protested Jim.
“Big business,” I scoffed. looking at the decrepit view.
“Well, it’s in places like this,” assured Jim, “that gold is found. If it’s gold you are looking for, you never want to go to one of those big handsome buildings. The bigger and handsomer the edifice, the less chance you have of coming out of it with anything.”
I studied my watch.
“He’s been three minutes already,” I gritted.
“Whose idea was it,” demanded Jim, “to get off the bus and accept this lift?”
“Both of us,” I stated. “It’s human nature to accept a lift.”
“Without even thinking,” said Jim.
“The guy was good-natured about it,” I submitted. “He’s a good-hearted guy, no doubt. We’re good-hearted guys. And we were in a hurry…”
“The trouble is,” propounded Jimmie, “nobody stops to think any more. There is no time for pondering.”
The factory door opened, and our friend stuck his head out.
“I’m afraid I’ll be another 10 or 15 minutes…” he began.
But Jim and I were already out the doors and headed up the narrow cluttered street, back along the side street and out to Spadina.
We were 17 minutes late at the office.
But the editor was locked up in a conference with the vice-president for 40 minutes. So Jim had time to put a few more finishing touches on Birdseye Center while we waited.
Editor’s Notes:
- A gang plow is a plow designed to turn two or more furrows at one time ↩︎
- The Dumbarton Oaks Conference was an international conference at which proposals for the establishment of the United Nations, were formulated and negotiated. The conference was led by the Four Policemen – the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China. It was held at the Dumbarton Oaks estate in Washington, D.C., from August 21, 1944, to October 7, 1944. ↩︎
- The 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement was the first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states. The Bretton Woods system required countries to guarantee convertibility of their currencies into U.S. dollars, with the dollar convertible to gold for foreign governments and central banks at US$35 per ounce of gold. ↩︎
- The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one would want to be treated by them. ↩︎
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