facture by buying a rifle factory to supplement his cartridge factory. And he became a member of one of the most astute business families in the world through his marriage with the daughter of Mr. William Rockefeller.

Thus, in 1914, Mr. Marcellus Hartley Dodge, aged 34, possessed the big plant of the Union Metallic Cartridge Company at Bridgeport, the big plant of the Remington Arms Company at Ilion, N. Y., and business connections that radiated from the very heart of the powerful Standard Oil group of financiers in New York.

Then came the European war-and war contracts.

The inside story of the Dodge war contracts is probably known only to the insiders. But the material effects of them burst upon Bridgeport like the efflorescence of a tropical jungle under the influence of a summer's sun. Where had been vacant lots or rambling houses, swiftly rose seven four-story brick buildings, fronting the full length of a city block apiece-new buildings of the Union Metallic Cartridge Company. Where one shift of working people had been employed nine hours a day, suddenly three shifts of eight hours each were substituted, at better wages. Where 2,200 people had been an average working force, more than 7,000 now crowded the street between the twin rows of factories. Electric lights glared on every foot of yard and wall, armed men mounted guard at every gate and passageway. As the product of these stimulated factories was destined for the Entente Allies, the possession by an employee of a German name became at once a suspicious circumstance that earned discharge unless proof, in pedigree and past performance, could be furnished of indubitable loyalty.

Bridgeport quickly showed the effects of the first war orders. Street cars were crowded, jitney buses multiplied, "rents" became scarce, real estate rose in value, theatres and hotels did a big business, bank deposits began to grow, shop-keepers prospered. Bridgeport was in the first stage of a war boom.

But more was to come. A rumor reached the ears of the Board of Trade that Mr. Dodge intended to build an immense

new plant of the Remington Arms Company, to supplement the plant at Ilion, N. Y. The rumor located this new development in Canada. This was intolerable to the Board. They first verified the rumor, and then demonstrated to the Dodge interests that Bridgeport was better equipped to supply skilled laborers, and houses for them to live in, than their Canadian rival. The new factory came to Bridgeport.

Probably no more dramatic illustration of the power of money and organization has lately been given anywhere than was given by the magician-like creation of this mighty plant. In the five months from March 15 to August 16, 1915, a row of one-story brick buildings and a parallel row of five-story brick buildings a quarter of a mile long rose upon a site north of the Union Metallic Cartridge works. Where before had been only cheap frame dwellings scattered through a desert of vacant lots, suddenly swarmed two thousand workmen, tearing down old structures, digging up the earth for foundations, arranging mountains of brick into orderly walls. Carpenters and glaziers and roofers followed, and before the first dead leaves of autumn had reddened the ground, machinery was installed in eight of the eighteen buildings and three thousand [mechanics were making rifles and bayonets for the Allies.

And all this had come to be because the Allied Governments had put in the hands of the House of Morgan large sums of money, that had coaxed into activity other large sums of money in the hands of Marcellus Hartley Dodge, which had attracted still other large sums of money in the hands of the Rockefellers and others. conversations in London and New York had been translated into 8 or 10 million dollars' worth of visible new value in land and buildings in Bridgeport, Conn., besides daily work for thousands of flesh-and-blood American men and women.

The organizing genius displayed in mobilizing the man-power of this undertaking was as striking as the financial genius that mobilized the money which made it possible. The mere erection of the buildings had, of course, been committed to a construction company that had its

organization already in existence and trained for rush work. But how man this new factory, so suddenly called into being? How create quickly from nothing that delicately balanced mechanism of skilled hands and heads, working harmoniously and effectively, that is called an organization—and that usually is the product of years of carefully nurtured growth?

The employment of high-priced specialists was the solution. Major Walter G. Penfield was placed in command of the works. By his military training he was an organizer and disciplinarian; by his special studies he was an expert on small arms; and by his long service as superintendent of a Government arsenal he was a practical employer and manufacturer. He in turn committed parts of the management to other men equally experienced in specialized work. The employment director of a big corporation in Pittsburg was commissioned to hire the mechanics to man the machinery. The president of a large company near Philadelphia was engaged to solve the problem of housing the men whom the factory would call to Bridgeport. Men of like kinds were set at the other big tasks of organization.

HIRING A MAN EVERY TEN MINUTES

One of the biggest jobs was the hiring of

men.

For several months the employment bureau of the Remington Arms Company has been one of the sights of Bridgeport. It occupies a small detached building at one corner of the group of factories. All day long a line of men stands on the sidewalk in front of it. Each man in his turn has to satisfy an armed guard that he is a bona fide applicant for work before he may even enter the building. Once inside, he may have to wait twenty minutes before he can get the ear of the secretary to the director of employment. The secretary stands behind a counter, and the director sits behind the partitions of a private office. The secretary eliminates at once men who are obviously unfit for the work. They must be skilled-whether mechanics, draftsmen, statisticians, or what-not. If a man seems to be a likely candidate, the secretary hands him an application blank. It is a big sheet of paper, and the questions are as searching as the medical examiner's when a

man is seeking life insurance. Nar address, age, education, trade or profession experience, nationality, citizenship, ree ences, even religion, are required. After: man has filled out his application he har it to the secretary. In the next few day his answers are checked up from indepe dent sources, and if he still seems word while, he is again interviewed or employe outright. For several months, lately, be tween 1,400 and 1,600 new men a month have been employed. Though only 3,00 were working last November, the plant & then built, when fully equipped with ma chinery, will require the services of from 16,000 to 20,000 men; and that number wil probably be at work by the first of April.

The housing of these men and their families has required the work of an exper director and a staff of assistants. In his office in a tall building downtown, overlooking the city, he has kept a card index file of every room, house, or apartment in Bridgeport that could be rented. New workmen are placed in homes through this agency. But long ago Bridgeport ex hausted most of its resources in lodgings. Last February, the seven leading real estate dealers reported to the Board of Trade that they had 527 houses available-some of them two-family, some six-family, housesso that perhaps 800 "rents" were in the market. Practically every one of these was occupied before the summer was over. New houses were built, and were rented before the framework was up. Individual rooms grew so scarce that newcomers often had to sleep in the railroad station a night or two before they could find lodgings Many housekeepers that had never opened their homes to lodgers were persuaded to do so; and in a number of regular lodging houses the rooms were occupied by three sets of tenants every day, the beds vacated by the morning shift being remade to accommodate the dog-watch night shift just home from work-and so on through the twenty-four hours. Naturally, rents have risen, and Bridgeport landlords and housekeepers are taking a profit.

But, at the best, Bridgeport was unable to supply the demand for living quarters. The Remington Arms Company had to go into house-building on a big scale. Last

November it was erecting 84 brick dwellings -the smallest of them being two-family houses and the biggest of them duplex six-apartment houses. All these houses consist of either four or five rooms and bath, and they are furnace-heated and electrically lighted. In this way 196 families were being provided for. The Company even then had plans laid out, however, by which it will ultimately provide modern dwellings for 2,500 families. And it has enlisted the coöperation of professional real-estate operators from as far west as Chicago in the development of new residential tracts in Bridgeport to care for the thousands of additional families for whom homes must be provided during this year.

The welfare of the men at their work has been equally considered from the first. The factories contain the most modern sanitary appliances-steel lockers for the men's clothes, shower baths, gymnasium, emergency hospital, and a kitchen from which 10,000 people can be fed in thirty minutes. The man whom the Government borrowed from the Y. M. C. A. to manage the welfare work in the Canal Zone during the digging of the Panama Canal was employed to install and direct the welfare work of the plant. His duties include the supervision of the details mentioned above, and, besides, the formation of baseball teams, rifle clubs, and other recreational agencies; the organization of the work for "safety first" and of "first aid" squads; and the arbitration of individual cases of friction in the relations of the men and their bosses.

200 ARMED GUARDS ON DUTY

Military discipline is maintained throughout the works. Two hundred armed guards are posted around the grounds and throughout the buildings. They are not in uniform, but they wear a distinctive badge; and every one of them is an ex-United States regular soldier and means business when he says "Stop!" Every person who enters the grounds, workmen included, must have a pass, and the pass expires during the current day at an hour that is marked on it. At every doorway in every building a guard halts the bearer and inspects the pass.

It is as hard to get out as to get in. If a man loses his pass while inside, the next guard he meets takes him to the guard house, and he is not released until he gives a satisfactory account of himself and gets a new pass from the head office.

In this atmosphere of military efficiency and under the mellow glow of so much new gold, Bridgeport blossomed into a rapid business growth. The "Remington-U. M. C." had not only brought to town men and money: it had come demanding tools as well. Even by November it had managed to equip only the five bayonet factories and three of the rifle factories with tools for the men to work with. It placed orders with practically every machine shop in Bridgeport that could work in metal, so that concerns that had nearly starved during the lean summer of 1914 were running three shifts a day in the summer of 1915. Shops that could not make tools were set at other useful tasks; one company that normally manufactured chains and locks was 'soon turning out nothing but the little metal clips in which soldiers carry cartridges in rounds of five.

But Remington-U. M. C. was by no means the only concern in Bridgeport that profited by war orders and contributed to the booming of business: it was simply the biggest and the most spectacular. The great Bridgeport Brass Company took contracts and enlarged its staff of mechanics. The Locomobile Company increased its working force from a normal average of about 1,200 employees to about 1,800 employees; and soon motor trucks, laden with test loads of old iron, were careering around the streets and suburban highways of Bridgeport-going, after final inspection, under their own power to the piers in New York from which they embarked on ships for Europe. Here, too, a curious and profitable indirect reaction of war orders was felt: the depression of 1914 had hard hit a company in Bridgeport that manufactured monumental bronze castings, chiefly for cemeteries. After the Locomobile Company got its contract for trucks, it gave to this company an order for castings, to be used in their construction, that far more than made up for its sluggish business of the year before.

All these accretions of men and money in Bridgeport were utilized on behalf of the Entente Allies. Meanwhile, the Germans also were busy. As the New York World's exposure of the activities of German agents showed, the seven-acre plant of the Bridgeport Projectile Company, which was created from nothing in the last year, was erected to manufacture munitions for the Central Powers. Some evidence exists to suggest that it was intended chiefly to give a material basis for a gigantic game of bluff by which the Germans should be enabled to contract for great quantities of shell-making machinery and thereby hinder the manufacture of shells for the Allies. However that may be, land was bought and large factories erected at a cost of several millions of dollars; and Bridgeport prospered accordingly.

Meanwhile, our own Government was stimulated to begin taking military precautions, and Bridgeport got the benefit of some of its near-war orders. These came to the Lake Torpedo Boat Company, which manufactures submarines after the designs of Mr. Simon Lake. When the war began, this company was making few boats and had no immediate prospects of expansion in business. But a month ago, the company, having bought new water lots adjoining its old plant, was finishing work which would quadruple its capacity of 1914. Whereas it could build five boats a year at that time, it can now turn out twenty. And the product is intended for the American Navy, as the company has so far refused all foreign orders, though it has been able to maintain this position only with great difficulty.

THE WAR GROWTH OF BRIDGEPORT

Before the war began, a recent careful census showed that 102,000 people lived in Bridgeport. Very conservative estimates, based upon the known new mechanics employed in the factories, upon school statistics, and upon other dependable indications, prove that at least 20,000 people have been added to the population in the last year. By next April, when the Remington plant will probably be fully manned, at least another 20,000 can fairly be added to the estimate. An increase of

40 per cent. in population in eighteer months is a pretty good performance for even a small boom town in the West; to achieve it in a staid old manufacturing city in New England is to give striking evidence of the significance of war orders in the economic life of the country.

The war, of course, has not created anv new mechanics. It has not caused the immigration of mechanics from abroad, for they are all needed at home. Indeed, many American artisans have gone to Europe to work at high wages in Government arsenals. Hence the newcomers in Bridgeport are workmen from other parts of the United States. But the significance of their employment here is that they are employed. In 1913 and 1914 manufactures of all kinds had lagged. Many men were laid off; many more were working only part time. The war itself threw still more men. in certain manufactures, out of work Textile mills, especially, were forced to cut down their staffs because they could not get German dyestuffs through the British blockade. But for men thrown out of work by industrial depression and by the war, the war created new jobs.

EFFECTS ON LABOR

And these new jobs were of a character that gave the men an opportunity of which they quickly availed themselves an opportunity to make new and better terms for the sale of their labor. Speed is of the essence of war contracts. Thus the Remington-U. M. C. early went on an eight-hour day to get continuous operation at the highest possible efficiency. The choice was between two shifts of twelve hours each and three shifts of eight hours each. With American skilled workmen accustomed to the nine-hour day as the outside limit, the three-shift eight-hour day was the only possible alternative. The company accepted the situation-war contracts are highly profitable if the goods are delivered and worthless if they are not. And to get the men they needed, and to keep them high wages were offered.

The effect of this situation on labor conditions in the older establishments 1 Bridgeport is easily imagined. Here was a powerful new company come to town.