Gain

by Richard Powers

  The structural solution to this dilemma revealed itself to be a company that was both more centralized and more diverse. Revamping simultaneously strengthened the core nervous system and increased the number of limbs.

  From the first, the new structure distinguished between those responsible for guiding daily operations and those who directed broader company objectives. At every gauge, each man now either directed or implemented. Each of the many functional departments included both an executive planner and a day-to-day manager. Collectively, the committee of executive department heads planned the policies and set the direction of the enterprise as a whole.

  Authority ran from the president to each departmental executive, then on to his departmental manager and staff, downward through each works manager, group supervisor, and team foreman. Each department held regular meetings of plant managers and staff. At these brainstorming sessions, people at all levels of the hierarchy traded ideas on how to save costs, eliminate inefficiency, and increase production.

  CLARE SOAP AND CHEMICAL, 1909

  Clare had become a vast man-of-war, if not a small armada. The new organizational chart demanded a new managerial class. On down into the less visible levels, freight managers, personnel managers, and credit managers all turned their trades. The hierarchy itself provided for its own replenishment. Word went out: be aware of those among the skilled laborers who showed a predilection for leadership. Douglas himself often made promotions without ever once watching the soul at work. A good secondhand description was all he needed to know when a man possessed the will to organize.

  Whatever the source of his ability, Douglas showed frightening skill in promoting those persons who best understood the new gospel of centralized departments. He enlarged the powers of this new stratum of middle managers, while also increasing their accountability to those above them. He himself abhorred the need to intervene in any branch of the concern that he had hired other people to attend to.

  The rainbow of restructured levels had to appear both delineated and continuous: a peaceable kingdom where lowliness and power drank from the same stream. The system would work only if a person who filled one level of responsibility could be raised in time to another level as fluidly as the industrial process plants promoted salt to bicarbonate and then to soda ash.

  Clare’s lowliest workers—according to Douglas, the concern’s only bedrock resource—had to believe that the operation did not just spend human capital but also invested it. They had to feel that Clare needed them, that the endeavor molded their efforts into something of greater worth, the way vats transmuted dead animal parts into hygiene or Sales converted soap into more capital. Labor, too, had to feel it might be infinitely improved.

  Douglas raised his novice managerial class on a system of incentives—credits, as the protocol called them. Chits paid out for seniority and performance were converted, by an indirect formula never entirely available to the rated workers, into rewards of rank and pay. Paperwork recorded the merits and demerits of every employee. Folders dutifully rated all personal accomplishments, just as careful sales figures now tracked the fate of each Clare product. Formal accounting ensured that, in time, the well-sown seed would rise and the seed that fell upon barren ground would die of its own accord.

  The restructured company looked for a way of doing business that was worthy of its new profile. That meant reinventing the old channels of distribution as well. After much introspection, and over the vocal alarm of his board, Douglas hatched a plan to circumvent the old network of corrupt jobber sinecures that the company had dealt with since Resolve, Samuel, and Ennis first sold soap by the generic pound.

  It made sense for the Industrial Goods Department to deal directly with those purchasers who made up the majority of Clare’s bulk chemical customers. What money it lost on small lots it more than made up for in realized savings. Yet the Personal Goods Department still depended upon wholesalers. No firm could hope to build an internal sales force enormous enough to replace such go betweens. Trying to sell to every store in the burgeoning West would be an expensive catastrophe.

  Nevertheless, Clare could offer its largest urban retailers volume discounts, if the stores would bind themselves contractually to sell at list price. And through remote warehouses and small regional sales offices, Clare could still undersell, by a few fractions of a cent, its closest competitors in the most lucrative city markets.

  Clare offered the same laddered discount scheme to its old jobbers. And to keep the game fair, it fined all stores that violated price contracts. But its internal sales forces—first five men, then ten, then twelve—took to the outfield to plug the jobbers’ gaps and push its distributors to the fences in all areas of the map.

  In effect, Clare now competed against its own jobbers in getting Native Balm, Snowdrop, Gifford’s Double Eagle Whiskey, and all the rest of Clare’s beloved line into the stores. Some of their oldest customers grew furious at the move. Some cried foul and refused to carry Clare any longer.

  But Douglas ventured to bet the entire eighty-year family excursion that the greedy would shrink from pauperizing themselves in an escalating war of spite. All parties lived off the fat of the spread banquet. The slighted jobbers would settle for selling the still-lucrative scraps, rather than lose everything. Pride was a quality no businessman could afford.

  And he bet right. The public called out for its familiar brands. If a store dropped Clare, some of its shoppers looked elsewhere to find the name they had grown to trust. One by one, the apostate merchants came back into manufacturing’s fold. The transformation of American business was complete.

  The company reorganization would live or die on the character of its hired representatives. Clare’s internal sales infantry had to sell the salesman himself as much as the salesman’s samples. Douglas and Hiram taught their sales managers how to choose these new foot soldiers. The instructions were explicit, arriving in a steady barrage of handwritten memos:

  If a man reeks or sweats, if his shirt is stained by food or his collar yellowed, you do not want him going out to meet the public in our firm’s name. He is not the man for the style of life we are now merchandising . . .

  Our fellow must make the people feel he has come from the same place as they, prayed in the same church, worked in the same office, but has gotten on a shade more cleanly, more efficiently . . . “You, too,” the man’s face must say. “You want to go where I have gotten. I am what you could be, if your life was a little better managed . . .”

  Clare’s new sales force offered quantity reductions, not just on its stock of goods but on the entire package deal of ordered existence.

  Honesty and simplicity turned a brisk trade, for the world had grown keen on purchasing those quantities that it most sorely lacked. The Soap Maker’s Journal decried the passing of those very values from the trade. A brand of “No. 1” no longer had any real reference to process or material. Soapmakers disguised inferior or spoiled runs with heavy perfumes and additives. Soap might contain anything: flour, chalk dust, paste. The new science of advertisement produced its very own free-for-all. Cheap fly-by-night brands such as Kickapoo and Sapolio built small empires on nothing but pretty words and pictures. The volley of claims that drove the new century forced even manufacturers of decent wares to escalate in kind. The avuncular Nagel’s response was to tempt the wholesome and ordinary on to ever more dizzying heights of self-defense. Hiram’s posters and jingle campaigns partook of a genial, ingenious populism on a scale beyond any Boston Clare’s wildest flight of normalcy:

  You would not eat the meat of diseased cattle, and no sooner would you wash your plates in the fat of those same unfortunate beasts. Protect yourself. Use only soaps made from the purest vegetable oils. Snowdrop Soap comes entirely from the goodness of plants . . .

  In this increasingly complex and volatile world that we all share, at least one thing remains certain: You get what you pay for, unfortunately. If you have found a bargain that seems too good to be tr
ue, it most probably is. Weigh your soap, and do not settle for an ounce less than the figure printed on the wrapper.

  Countless icons of legendary camp and nostalgia flowed from Nagel’s bottomless imagination. He gave birth to the little black boy, rolling his eyes in ecstasy at how sparkling Pearl Tooth Powder left his remaining baby teeth. He announced the Suds Party as “New York’s latest fad this season.” He let the Modern Woman run, jump, swim, cycle, and throw a softball, her two million three hundred thousand open pores calling out for a gentle body soap.

  And Nagel let loose a flurry of babies. Babies everywhere. Infants by the dry ton, in pictures, paeans, and prayers.

  The happiest product of the Lord’s imagination is the oval face of a newborn child. It is like the most delicate of blooms. You would not wash the blooms of your garden in harsh chemicals. Neither should you let them touch the skin of your babe.

  He penned the tune and lyric—beloved of rakes everywhere—that demanded to know, “What do you need more than anything else?” He credited himself with coining the phrase “Squeaky clean.” He taught the country the three essentials of a healthy breakfast and how to prepare them. He devised the Snowdrop Soap bracelet charm, coveted by as-yet-unmarried girls across the country. And he gave away in holy matrimony to a grateful nation Clara Clear, America’s zaftig Ambassadress of Sweetheartiness, whose copyright Mary Pickford cheerfully if anemically violated.

  The new volume discount scheme that Clare offered to its biggest retailers inspired Nagel to extend the offer to the customer herself. Buy twelve, he told America’s housewives, and you will get one free. Store them on end, in darkness, for they will only improve with age.

  It may strike you as counter to our own interests to tell you how to extend the life of every bar of Clare soap that you purchase. But in truth, our interests are best served by serving yours. This is how we have done business for eighty years, and how we intend to stay in business for at least that much longer.

  Amid these prosaic claims, Nagel inserted leaves from the sainted memory of Peter Clare. Now that the poetry-lover was dead, the man of verse was free to trot. His anonymous poets—whose nimble feet were easily the match of Kilmer’s or Kipling’s—graced the pages of The Atlantic, The Century, and The Ladies’ Home Journal with stanzas of sentiment and humor.

  Each poem came to life through its own litho or woodcut. Nagel insisted on hiring the day’s top artists and writers. At first, all art went unsigned. But as public enthusiasm for the works grew, artists and writers alike gladly attached their names to what often became their most popular and lasting creations.

  Jackson Stimpke, the portraitist, produced a series of colored inserts, including the famous beauty in shining finery titled Arrayed for Conquest. Georgette Garner Roberts chipped in, painting Baby’s Ablutions and The End of the Day. For ten wrappers, a reader could get any one of these color paintings on fine, coated paper, ready to frame.

  The Chicago Tribune did not know which service to praise more: the steady inspiration and delight of these poems and pictures, or the astounding new factory that threatened to produce half a million cakes of soap a day:

  Such a plant in itself provides an inspiration that no Poussin nor self-respecting Virgil of any age would let go to waste . . . Whatever one’s personal habits, all must admit the astonishing force for health, wealth, and happiness that this firm now represents, both in its manufacturing might and in the face of mirth and moral betterment it presents to the world.

  The poems and illustrations grew so popular that any attempt to substitute another form of testimonial in their place produced overwhelming hue and cry. The Clare mailbags began to swell with amateur submissions, so many that they practically forced a brilliant idea upon Hy Nagel.

  Why pay famous and high-priced folk to do what the public craved to do for free? Nagel began to run the best of the unsolicited verse, crediting the authors and citing their daytime line of work. This only fueled the interests of the nation’s versifiers to see their name immortalized in print. At last Nagel ran a continent-wide contest for the best poem commemorating the virtues of any Clare soaps. He offered two thousand dollars, a sum set in honor of the new century.

  The company received 39,472 submissions. Hiram himself wrote the galloping rejection sonnet, mass-mailed to all the losers, whose send-off lamented:

  That ever we did suffer so much woe

  In telling forty thousand beauties, “No.”

  The winning poem came from Mr. Herbert Kalksteen, an insurance salesman in Lincoln, Nebraska. Kalksteen’s submission was titled “The Blessings of Time.”

  Praise we the souls whom the harsh years once tested:

  Pioneer spirits whose moil and pride

  Would craft from their leftover drippings and potash,

  Gelatinous masses, saponified . . .

  There followed two stanzas on the extreme difficulty of making soap from scrap while at the same time having to clear forests, hold off native attacks, farm by hand, and bury dozens of children.

  We who can speak ’cross unthinkable distances,

  Who thunder on iron, who take to the air,

  We who, galvanically, drive back the darkness

  Cannot begin to conceive of your cares . . .

  How much, in that darkness, your cleanliness mattered!

  How laden with brambles the way that you came.

  The war that you waged for the spotless and decent

  Puts all of your latter-day scions to shame.

  And on through four more equally inspired stanzas describing the inconceivable increase of human health and declaring how much luckier life had become than any of the past’s pathfinders could have supposed. It closed on the chorus:

  Had you but dreamt what Advancement would bring us,

  Our utter advantage o’er soil and grime!

  How large life has grown, how complete the ascendance

  That we have achieved through the Blessings of Time!

  Hiram chose the poem in part because it was one of the few out of all the thousands of entries rhyming “soap” with “hope” that didn’t mention Clare by name. It seemed time to capitalize on all Clare’s preexisting advertising, to unite the firm with inevitability’s other nameless forces, and to render all mention of the grand manufacturer conspicuous in its absence.

  The first runner-up, vastly more popular with the public, resorted to the tragical-pastoral-comical:

  Amaryllis does the wash,

  Cursing Colin soundly.

  Skin is ruined, day is lost,

  And fabric reeketh roundly.

  She, ’midst boiling and much mopping,

  Waxing furious, mad-hopping,

  Scolds her swain,

  Forsooth, for fain,

  She’d rather far be shopping.

  Clare’s Powdered Yellow Laundry Soap for Mechanical Washing Devices arrives by line eighteen, to get our girl to town with skin and lower back intact, while at the same time astonishingly preserving the meter.

  The director of promotion gathered together the best two dozen contest entries and published them as a twenty-four-page booklet. This Clare gave away to wholesalers as yet another promotion. Such booklets of ad reproductions would take the firm up through the Great Depression: woodcuts for coloring, poems to laugh at and savor and recite, lithos for collecting or framing. All free.

  The winds of a new era also called for a coordinated change of packaging across Clare’s growing product line. The archaic Indian head belonged to the dead century. He no longer served to proclaim all the goods the firm now trafficked in. Nagel commissioned one of his stable of artists to capture in an image this fresh breeze, clean and bracing, transfiguring all that it blustered over.

  The anonymous engraver drew upon the original, stylized image of the Utilis bud that Clare had once stamped upon its crates for trade protection. He worked it into a circle of twisting vines, gilded in profusion. Clare registered the new trademark in 1911, the year that the S
upreme Court busted up the Standard Oil trust.

  Two Irish washerwomen with overflowing tubs, decrying soaps that employ harsh chemicals.

  A moonstruck young heir telling his sweet young croquet partner that he lost his concentration in the glare.

  A herd of mud-spattered cows eyeing a bull who has just scrubbed himself clean with a trade-stamped bar: “He doesn’t know his own kine.”

  A black baby bathing himself closer in tone to the white baby sharing his suds.

  A sultan who proclaims that his entire harem must wash their hair with the formula his newest and youngest wife has just discovered.

  Automobile mechanics agreeing that there is only one product strong enough to get them clean.

  Two muttonchopped stockbrokers in a brilliantly appointed train compartment complaining about chapped hands.

  A young couple savoring social success and business promotion brought about by their radiant table covering.

  Santa stuffing soap cakes into fireside stockings.

  Uncle Sam distributing free samples to baffled but eager Ellis Islanders.

  An Indian and his wife, strolling with a bar of hard white soap on a leash, above a two-stanza poem entitled “Reclaimed”:

  We once were factious, fierce and wild,

  To peaceful arts unreconciled,

  Our blankets smeared with grease and stains

  From buffalo meat and settlers’ veins . . .

  But I——Y SOAP came like a ray

  Of light across our darkened way.