Sinclair Lewis

“ Other people “in the trade” sniffed at Herzfeld and Cohn for their Quixotic notions of discipline, but they made it pay in dividends as well as in affection. At breakfast Una would find herself eager to get back to work, though Herzfeld and Cohn had but a plain office in an ugly building of brownstone and iron Corinthian columns, resembling an old-fashioned post-office, and typical of all that block on Church Street. There was such gentleness here as Una was not to find in the modern, glazed-brick palace of Pemberton’s. ”

“ Machines were the Pemberton force, and their greatest rivals were the machines of steel and wood, at least one of which each new efficiency expert left behind him: Machines for opening letters and sealing them, automatic typewriters, dictation phonographs, pneumatic chutes. But none of the other machines was so tyrannical as the time-clock. Una admitted to herself that she didn’t see how it was possible to get so many employees together promptly without it, and she was duly edified by the fact that the big chiefs punched it, too.... ”

“ Ross in his mighty labors, yet at heart she was a shawled Irish peasant, or a muzhik lost in the vastness of the steppes; a creature elemental and despairing, facing mysterious powers of nature—human nature. ”

“ Even the chiefs’ outside associates were tremendous, buyers and diplomatic representatives; big-chested men with watch-chains across their beautiful tight waistcoats. And like envoys extraordinary were the efficiency experts whom Mr. Pemberton occasionally had in to speed up the work a bit more beyond the point of human endurance.... One of these experts, a smiling and pale-haired young man who talked to Mr. Ross about the new poetry, arranged to have office-boys go about with trays of water-glasses at ten, twelve, two, and four. ”

“ Ross’s imperturbable belief that things-as-they-are were going pretty well, that “you can’t change human nature,” Una would become meek and puzzled, lose her small store of revolutionary economics, and wonder, grope, doubt her millennial faith. Then she would again see the dead eyes of young girls as they entered the elevators at five-thirty, and she would rage at all chiefs and bright young men.... ”

“ Otherwise the whole affair was a hodge-podge of petty people and ignoble motives—of Una and Wilkins and S. Herbert Ross and Bessie Kraker, who married a mattress-renovator, and Bessie’s successor; of fifteen dollars a week, and everybody trying to deceive everybody else; of vague reasons for going, and vaguer reasons for letting Una go, and no reason at all for her remaining; in all, an ascent from a scrub-rag to a glorified soap-factory designed to provide Mr. Pemberton’s daughters-in-law with motors. ”

“ Jealousy of position, cattishness, envy of social standing—these were as evident among the office-women as they are in a woman’s club; and Una had to admit that woman’s cruelty to woman often justified the prejudices of executives against the employment of women in business; that women were the worst foes of Woman. ”

“ King Pemberton and his princely sons do not believe in all this nonsense about profit-sharing, or a minimum wage, or an eight-hour day, or pensions, or any of the other fads by which dangerous persons like Mr. Ford, the motor manufacturer, encourage the lazier workmen to think that they have just as much right to rise to the top as the men who have had nerve and foresight. ”

“ She watched with peculiar interest one stratum: the old ladies, the white-haired, fair-handed women of fifty and sixty and even seventy, spinsters and widows, for whom life was nothing but a desk and a job of petty pickings—mailing circulars or assorting letters or checking up lists. ”

“ Intermingled with this caste were the petty chiefs, the office-managers and bookkeepers, who were velvety to those placed in power over them, but twangily nagging to the girls and young men under them. Failures themselves, they eyed sourly the stenographers who desired two dollars more a week, and assured them that while personally they would be very glad to obtain the advance for them, it would be “unfair to the other girls.” ”

“ She endeavored to picture a future in which women, the ordinary, philoprogenitive, unambitious women, would have some way out besides being married off or killed off. She envisioned a complete change in the fundamental purpose of organized business from the increased production of soap—or books or munitions—to the increased production of happiness. ”

“ He tightened his lips and tapped on his desk-pad with a blue pencil; he looked grieved and said, touchingly: “I think you’re making a mistake. I was making plans for you; in fact, I had just about decided to offer you eighteen dollars a week, and to advance you just as fast as the business will warrant. I, uh, well, I think you’re making a mistake in leaving a sure thing, a good, sound, conservative place, for something you don’t know anything about. I’m not in any way urging you to stay, you understand, but I don’t like to see you making a mistake.” ”

“ She saw that the comfortable average men of the office sooner or later, if they were but faithful and lived long enough, had opportunities, responsibility, forced upon them. No such force was used upon the comfortable average women! ”

“ Always she saw the girls of twenty-two getting tired, the women of twenty-eight getting dry and stringy, the women of thirty-five in a solid maturity of large-bosomed and widowed spinsterhood, the old women purring and catty and tragic.... ”

“ It has been calculated that ninety-three million women in all parts of the world have ruined their complexions, and, therefore, their souls, by Pemberton’s creams and lotions for saving the same; and that nearly three-tenths of the alcohol consumed in prohibition counties is obtained in Pemberton’s tonics and blood-builders and women’s specifics, the last being regarded by large farmers with beards as especially tasty and stimulating. ”

“ They were very strong on the subject of not being unfair to the other girls, and their own salaries were based on “keeping down overhead.” Oldish men they were, wearing last-year hats and smoking Virginia cigarettes at lunch; always gossiping about the big chiefs, and at night disappearing to homes and families in New Jersey or Harlem. Awe-encircled as the very chiefs they appeared when they lectured stenographers, but they cowered when the chiefs spoke to them, and tremblingly fingered their frayed cuffs. ”

“ It took a cherry fountain syrup which was merely a chemical imitation that under an old name was familiar to everybody; it gave the syrup a new name, and made twenty million children clamor for it. Mr. Pemberton could never quite understand that advertising was merely a matter of salesmanship by paper and ink, nor that Mr. Ross’s assistants, who wrote the copy and drew the pictures and selected the mediums and got the “mats” over to the agency on time, were real advertising men. ”

“ Just beneath the chiefs was the caste of bright young men who would some day have the chance to be beatified into chiefs. They believed enormously in the virtue of spreading the blessings of Pemberton’s patent medicines ”

“ The office politics bred caste. Caste at Pemberton’s was as clearly defined as ranks in an army.
At the top were the big chiefs, the officers of the company, and the heads of departments—Mr. Pemberton and his sons, the treasurer, the general manager, the purchasing-agent, the superintendents of the soda-fountain-syrup factory, of the soap-works, of the drug-laboratories, of the toilet-accessories shops, the sales-manager, and Mr. S. Herbert Ross. The Olympian council were they ”