Gottland: Mostly True Stories From Half of Czechoslovakia (2 page)

He falls in love and proposes. He breaks off the engagement when his fiancée reveals to him that she can’t have children.

He goes to the famous Czech ball in Vienna; by now he is a well-known shoemaker who exports his shoes to the Balkans and Asia Minor. He is hoping to meet his future wife at the ball. He is attracted to Maňa Menčíková, daughter of the curator of the Imperial Library. The girl plays the piano and speaks three languages. Tomáš knows there has to be a written contract for everything. He sends a friend to ask the young lady whether she would sign a memorandum to
this effect: if she were not able to have children, they would divorce.

“So what benefit may I demand of him if I fail to satisfy his hopes?” replies the future Marie Batová. (After two years of trying for a child without success, Marie secretly buys a bottle of poison.)

For several months they have been living in a new villa, which Tomáš built before the wedding, so that his wife wouldn’t feel any difference between life in Vienna and life in Zlín. When orders increase and the factory has to operate at night, Marie pours lemonade for the workers and hands out sandwiches. On returning home, she sometimes wonders whether a tree that doesn’t produce fruit should be cut down, and glances at the little bottle.

In Sarajevo, the life of Archduke Franz Ferdinand comes to an end. Austria announces mobilization.

The most eminent Czech of the twentieth century, professor of philosophy Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, deputy to the Viennese parliament, comes back from vacation. “As I was on my way to Prague, I saw our people answering the call-up—in horror, as if going to the slaughter,” he will say later. He has pangs of conscience. “Our people are off to the army and to prison, while we deputies sit at home.”

Tomáš Bata is horrified: all his factory workers must
report for the war being fought by the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Next morning, over his coffee, bacon and eggs, he has an idea: he will go to Vienna and extract an order for boots for the army. He leaves his eggs, gets in a horse-drawn cab, and races to the railway station at Otrokovice near Zlín. But the train has already left. So he buys the horses from the coachman and tells him to chase after the train. The animals rush as fast as the express through three villages, but in the fourth they collapse. In only six minutes Tomáš buys another cab and horses. He catches up with the train, and in a few hours he reaches Vienna.

In his opinion, one should never give in to reality, but always make skillful use of it for one’s own purposes. In the course of two days, he secures an order for half a million pairs of boots and a guarantee that his workers won’t go to the war.

His deal struck, he has seven minutes left to catch the train home; meanwhile a police unit is already rounding up his workers as deserters. On the way to the station, the cab in which Tomáš is riding gets into an accident, so the passenger jumps out and runs the rest of the way. He boards an express train to Brno.

He also gives work to laborers and cobblers who aren’t employed at his factory. Even to those who used to be his sworn enemies. He saves the entire district from going to the front.

Towards the end of the war, in spite of the crisis, he will have almost five thousand workers, who will produce ten thousand pairs of army boots each day.

Marie Batová has long since forgotten the little bottle of poison which she bought before Christmas, and her decision
that, if the eleventh course of treatment by the eighth doctor failed, she would commit suicide.

The last doctor had advised that impregnation could not happen in Zlín, and that Tomáš Bata would have to be away from his own terrain. So they went to the Krkonoše Mountains for ten days. (Nobody believed that Bata could endure so many days without inspecting the production line.)

As the shoemaker leaves his eggs and bacon and runs for the train, his wife is already in the seventh month of her pregnancy.

Bata’s son Tomáš is born, known as Tomík to differentiate him from his father.
^†

The war ends and the Czechoslovak state is founded. A large part of it has been “Bata-ized” for some time now.

“Tomáš established branches of Bata in almost every Moravian village, and as a result soon there was hardly anyone working privately as a cobbler in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, or Slovakia. Made-to-measure shoes became a thing of the past. Later on, Bata founded his own chain of workshops for shoe repair, and the profession of cobbler disappeared entirely,” writes the communist reporter Egon Erwin Kisch.

Bata defends himself: “The Earth has two billion inhabitants,”
he keeps saying. “Each year, only nine hundred million pairs of shoes are produced in the entire world. Each person needs two pairs a year at the very least. An ambitious shoemaker is presented with the opportunity to sell a billion pairs of shoes. It’s all just a question of price and the degree of civilization.”

They say (here I quote Kisch) there was a cobbler from Ostrava who, when he realized he had been completely ruined by Bata, packed his old workshop, dating back to the seventeenth century, into two cases and sent them to Bata’s factory, straight to the boss. Then he, his wife and their two children jumped into the river.

Tomáš Bata, who received the news of this desperate step and the legacy at one and the same time, declared: “Put a sign above it to say that this is a cobbler’s workshop from when I started working.”

Six-year-old Tomík goes to school barefoot. His father wants him to be no different from his schoolmates from Zlín.

The father sets up new production lines so that “each human unit is automatically driven to the greatest productivity.” If any single worker cannot keep pace in the production line, the conveyor belt stops and a red bulb lights up on the wall. Thanks to this signaling system, the entire unit can see not only that they must stop work, but also who is to blame.

“In my work I do not only think about building factories, but people. What I do involves building the human being,” notes Tomáš.

Rumors go round that Bata is in a mental hospital. One of the newspapers even publishes its address. Then, suddenly, leaflets appear all over Czechoslovakia, with the words:

In Europe, the post-war economic crisis continues for a third year, and there is galloping inflation, but Czechoslovakia manages to raise the value of the crown from six to eighteen U.S. cents. The country’s position vis-à-vis its creditors is growing stronger, yet its companies now have debts abroad. Bata has warehouses packed with goods, and his customers need shoes, but they have no money.

Each month the company sells as much as it has produced in four days. For the other twenty-six days it might as well not be working.

Tomáš refuses to fight for tax relief. He also thinks it would be wrong to lay off any of his workers, because they will immediately demand unemployment benefits from the young state.

Other factories have already thrown out thousands of workers. It bothers him that the unemployed will now definitely not be able to afford his shoes. The value of the German mark falls, and the country is flooded by German shoes, growing cheaper from one day to the next.

One morning, there’s a shock: posters appear on the walls showing a fist thumping the words “High Prices” and announcing that from today onwards, the price of Bata’s shoes has been almost halved. The shoes that used to cost 220 Czechoslovak crowns can now be bought for 119.

He tells the workers that you cannot overcome a major crisis by taking tiny steps.

He reduces their pay by 40 percent, but he doesn’t lay anybody off. He pledges that the food in the factory stores will only be sold at token prices. As the value of the crown isn’t rising, on their reduced pay they will live almost as well as before.

Customers rush to buy his shoes. He sells all the reserve stock in three months.

Of course he knows that the price reduction means immense losses for the factory, but it is the only way he can acquire hard cash. Moreover, this cash already has three times greater purchasing power, so he uses it to buy three times more materials.

Other firms lower their prices too, but by now it’s too late. Bata was the first to do it. The newspapers write about Bata’s seemingly illogical, but brilliant reaction to the strengthening of the crown.

Success. A year later Tomáš Bata will take on 1,800 new workers at the factory and will be elected
starosta
(mayor) of the city of Zlín.

Ten-year-old Tomík travels to Brno with his parents in an open car. His hat is blown off by the wind. The car stops, and the boy runs to fetch it. He comes back and hears his father say: “I told you you’ve got to be careful. If that happens again we’ll drive off without you.”

Ten minutes later, the hat is blown off again. Tomáš Bata tells the driver to stop the car, gives his son ten crowns, and says: “Go to the railroad station and take the train to Brno. You can ride in the car with us on the way home.”

However, the father must resign himself to going home without his son. The boy reaches Brno on time, goes into a Bata shoe store, borrows money from the cashier, and takes the train back to Zlín on his own.

When Tomík graduates from elementary school at the age of eleven, his parents send him to high school in London. He goes there with his own checkbook, and his father opens an account for him at the Guaranty Trust Company of New
York. To pay his tuition fees, the boy presents checks to the proprietor of the school. At this elite school, the teenager from Czechoslovakia causes a sensation.

At the age of fourteen, he goes back to Zlín and—in keeping with his father’s wishes—becomes a worker on the lowest wage. By now he can wear shoes.

When he is eighty-eight, I will ask his American secretary whether I may ask him some questions. “Yes,” she replies. “Best to ask just one question, and to make it an important one.”

I send it by e-mail: “Dear Mr. Bata, what’s the best way to live?”

“You must study hard,” replies Mr. Bata. “Look around you with your eyes open. Never repeat your mistakes, and draw conclusions from them. Work honestly and not just for your own profit. I don’t think that’s so difficult, is it?”

Tomáš Bata founds his first school. He does it out of compulsion, “because,” he explains, “there are no known cases of the best educators in the country becoming millionaires. Usually they are paupers.”

He advertises that he will accept six hundred boys aged fourteen for the next school year, and so his School for Young Men comes into being. A student at the school must finance himself. For eight hours a day, he earns enough in the factory for his food, board and clothing, and for four hours, he studies. Any sort of financial help from parents is forbidden. Each week, the student receives 120 crowns, spends seventy, and
saves the rest in his own account. It is all worked out so that when, at the age of twenty-four, the young man returns to Bata from military service, he will have 100,000 crowns in his account. Tutors at the boarding houses keep track of booklets recording the students’ expenditures. They also watch over the boys to make sure they keep their hands above their quilts. They are all given talks about hygiene and masturbation.

Emil Zátopek, the world’s top athlete of 1952, keeps his hands above the quilt. Others who will do so too include: the famous (forty years on) writer Ludvík Vaculík, and the leading representative of the new wave in Czechoslovak cinema (also, forty years on) director Karel Kachyňa. Kachyňa starts work at Bata as a cleaner, and finishes as a trained draughtsman. “I was a Bataman,” he’ll say, in the early twenty-first century. “At Zlín I learned to fight against fear.”

Each of Bata’s students is a Bataman.

You can become a Bataman through obedience and hard work.

Tomáš is feeling pleased: he never went beyond elementary school, and has no title apart from “Chief” on his office door, but he’s the author of a handbook entitled
Affluence for All
.

Tomáš Bata’s Academy of Commerce is established.

Tomáš Bata slams his shoe against the desk when one of the students uses the money he has earned to drive all the way to Prague for a performance by the American dancer Josephine Baker—pioneer of the striptease.

From then on, neither students nor workers are allowed
to sit around in bars; drinking any sort of alcohol within the boundaries of Zlín is forbidden. Milk is recommended.

Eight years after the Great October Revolution, Tomáš Bata initiates his experiments with capitalist society. He builds the citizens of Zlín an eight-story Community Center with a hotel (after the war, it will become the Hotel Moskva). He gives orders for there to be no café or wine bar on the ground floor next to the restaurant, just a big hall with table tennis, a bowling alley and a chess room (“because one should never stop thinking”).

His people will no longer work eight hours, from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Now they will work until 5 p.m., but at noon they will have a two-hour break. At that point the women can go home and make dinner, though Bata can’t see why they would, when he has built large canteens and a department store that sells everything. “Women,” he says in a speech, “you won’t even have to make preserves—Bata will make them for you.”

During the break the men and women can do what they like, but the following are recommended: