Frenzied Finance Part 40

In spite of my efforts the price of Amalgamated dropped and dropped and it was all I could do to prevent a quick crash. My profits--the immense sum of money I had obtained at the settlement--had been used up, together with the great sums I had borrowed on my own allotment of shares. At intervals I stopped long enough to make brief excursions into sugar or other stocks, out of which I captured additional hundreds of thousands, but every cent of such gains went toward staying the avalanche. These indeed were days of desperation and black despair, all the more trying because I had to look happy and talk hopefully; all the more difficult because my enemies came out of their holes and did their share to balk my efforts; all the more painful because the public were beginning to doubt whether the second section was coming--and whether it had best come--and our Boston "Coppers" had begun to drop in value.

During all this time I had troubled myself but little about the Flower pool, which had been set going soon after the conversation in which Mr.

Rogers had told me that he and Mr. Rockefeller intended to unload their stock. I concluded that the pool would surely get a share of what they had to sell, and showed no inclination to join in with it. But at last Mr. Rogers said to me:

"As every one is going into the pool, Lawson, it will seem strange if you are missing, so you had better send Flower your check and I will see you get it back later."

"For how much?" I asked him.

"A hundred thousand will be about right," he answered, and I sent it, and that was all I had heard of the subject until one day after the stock had been weaker than usual I received by mail a brusk notice from Flower & Co. to mail them another hundred thousand dollars. Immediately I called up the banking-house, and learned to my horror and astonishment that the pool had acc.u.mulated over 225,000 shares. I went at once to Mr.

Rogers with Flower's call and said:

"I know nothing whatever of this affair, Mr. Rogers, and as I have not been unloading any of my stock and have all I can do to keep up my end anyway, you will look after it, of course."

He took the notice and said: "I will attend to it." Remembering his intentions to unload, after what I had heard of the pool's acc.u.mulations I was not surprised at Mr. Rogers' willingness to take care of this matter of mine. It is of interest now, in looking back over our affairs, to recall that though there were several periods later when the sledding was hard, and I needed all the money I could lay hands on, he never offered to return me that hundred thousand, not even after the pool had liquidated, as will be shown later. In spite of this fact, in his readiness to hurl any charge or insult at me, he had his hireling, Denis Donohoe, recently make the accusation that I alone of all its members refused to keep up my payments to the Flower pool.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

A RETROSPECT AND A MORAL

The crime of Amalgamated and its immediate consequences are before my readers. I have fulfilled the promise made in my foreword to expose to the people of America the manner in which they have been plundered and the methods by which the "System" habitually cheats them out of their savings. Robbery conducted on so gigantic a scale as I have pictured must necessarily simulate the natural processes of finance, and to understand the deep devices of the schemers requires a knowledge of banking and commercial practices which the average man has no chance to attain. If I had begun my story by stating exactly what const.i.tuted the crime of Amalgamated, my readers would not have grasped its heinousness.

In the chapters that I have devoted to leading up to it they have been educated in the piratical practices of finance and financiers, and have acquired familiarity with the jugglery of corporations and the multiplication and division of stock certificates through which most of the great American fortunes have been created.

Depending still on the ignorance of its blinded dupes, the "System"

again raises its brazen face from among the poison rushes of Wall Street and hisses, "Listen to what he calls a great crime--a simple business transaction. It is no crime, but a common practice of modern finance and by no means unusual or extraordinary."

No crime to take by a trick from thousands of the people thirty-six millions of the results of our great country's prosperity? Think of what this vast sum represents--the revenues of a year's work of 36,000 men earning each $1,000. Think of it, ye millions who dig and delve and bear heavy burdens that your mothers, wives, and children may in exchange have a bite to eat and a couch to sleep upon!

The crime of Amalgamated, as I have explained it, const.i.tutes a specific breach of the banking laws of the State and nation. But the legal aspects of the offence are trivial in comparison with the great moral crime which was consummated by Henry H. Rogers and James Stillman, in the National City Bank on that night in May, 1899. Through false representations and specious pledges and the credit of the names of "Standard Oil" and the National City Bank, thousands of people were beguiled into investing their savings in this Amalgamated Copper Company. Because of the promise of great gains other thousands mortgaged their homes, appropriated their wives' savings, even their employers'

funds, and embarked in this fair-seeming enterprise. The greatest bank in America aided and abetted the conspiracy by the loan of its funds to lure the victims deeper into the toils. All in, the trap is sprung; the thousands are despoiled of their savings by familiar devices of finance, and throughout the land is spread a wave of misery, madness, and despair.

The crime of Amalgamated, a critical correspondent writes me, is purely a Wall Street offence, important to bankers and capitalists but of no consequence to the working men, the farmers, or the toiling millions who have no savings to invest in stocks. "Of what concern is it to us," says this writer, "how one section of the rich robs another of its h.o.a.rdings?"

Poor fool! A few men cannot deprive even a few thousands of so great a sum as $36,000,000 without working untold injury upon the entire body of the people. Such a stupendous sum looted from the coffers of the many and piled in the vaults of three or four men unbalances the whole economic structure of the nation. The consequences of that act do not end in the series of defalcations and bankruptcies, imprisonments and suicides, in the ruined homes and wrecked careers that follow in its immediate wake. In the grip of these plunderers intrenched in the stronghold of finance each of these filched millions becomes a new weapon of oppression. Because of the crime of Amalgamated every pound of food that goes to sustain life in the American people, every s.h.i.+ngle on every roof that shelters the American people, every mile of transportation for man or freight in America; in fact, every necessity and every luxury of the American people has had added to its cost some fractional increase, representing in the aggregate tens and tens of millions annually, which, flowing into the coffers of the "System,"

strengthen and extend its stupendous grip on the property of the nation.

Our country for a generation has been prosperous beyond the dreams of man, yet what have the ma.s.ses of our people to show for it? A better, a higher, and a MORE EXPENSIVE standard of living--that is all. That this prosperity which is our national boast will last forever is incredible.

Sooner or later will come one of the times when Nature frowns and sends her floods, her droughts, and her epidemics of disease. Is the American people prepared by its long-sustained prosperity to bridge over that period of want and suffering?

The truth is that the ma.s.s of our population has not sufficient surplus laid by to last over thirty days of such a calamitous interval. All the unearned increment of national prosperity the "System" has captured and capitalized. Not only have the people been deprived of the profits of their labor, but this capitalized prosperity is the stern instrument by which new burdens are laid on their shoulders and new t.i.thes are exacted from their wages. But for the plundering "System" the great ma.s.s of our people would be able to sit in their tents in the shade of their husbanded harvests and laugh to scorn the frowns of fortune. Now, I say, G.o.d help the nation when Nature, tired from her great work, rests, and the people, too, are compelled to rest--for then will come an awful awakening. When the millions face famine and realize for the first time that their gigantic storehouses, filled to bursting with the surplus of the past, are the property of the few who cannot even count the contents, much less use them--when they realize that these h.o.a.rded treasures are as far beyond their starved reach as are the violets and daisies beyond the picking of the galley-slave, then they will appreciate how much deeper and more d.a.m.nable are the crimes of the "System," such crimes as Amalgamated and its like, than even such national tragedies as the a.s.sa.s.sinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, at each of which all the people held aloft their hands in horror.

Why is it that the millions of intelligent, able-bodied Americans, who could crush the tribe of Rockefeller as elephants crush snakes, rise with each sun and dig and delve and suffer that a Rogers may wallow in wealth and an Armour gain a greater income than the Rothschilds? Why are they so easily hoodwinked into imagining that the elaborate reports detailing the immense and growing wealth of the country represent their own well-being and affluence? Because the wise men of the "System" know human nature, know that most men and women accept unquestioningly the conditions they find surrounding them. Each day it is pounded into the heads of the people through a hundred agencies that it is the greatest and most flouris.h.i.+ng of peoples and that the laws and customs which regulate its lives and rights are the best in all the world. How shall the people know that these glowing rumors, these propitious tidings, are but the siren songs of the "System" under the spell of which it is despoiled of its savings?

Ask yourselves, my friends, how much you know about those familiar things which are part of your lives as are the suns.h.i.+ne, the gra.s.s, and the flowers--your Bible, your money, your playing-cards. Each is an inst.i.tution so consecrated by custom that you accept it exactly for what it meant to your father just as he took it from his own father a generation before. That the Holy Book is G.o.d's message to His children, the human race, we know because we have the words of our ancestors therefor; the stamped silver and gold we take for granted as we do shoes and clothes, because money is an essential factor in the social fabric and the form in which it comes to us seems as inevitable as the moon or our ten fingers; humanity has gone on for hundreds of years considering the knave of greater value than the ten-spot and the ace of higher worth than all the rest of the pack, because it is content to believe that the rules that have been handed down apportioning these values are the best that could be devised. With a hundred other elements and details of our daily life, it is the same--we accept unreasoningly what we are told or what is given us, with no look forward or back, and, engaged with the thousand new toys and problems which Fate, the conjurer, shakes out of his hat, we become bound by habit and blinded by precedent.

The love men have for the formulas and conventions of their daily lives is the "System's" opportunity for plunder, and it is this fundamental principle of humanity that makes my work so difficult. It would be as easy to convince the ma.s.ses that their playing-cards are all wrong and that the ace is really of lower value than the two-spot as it is to awaken them to the terrors of the conditions that are confronting them; to compel them to realize that a despotism of dollars is being organized among them; that the cherished inst.i.tutions of generations are the instruments by which a few daring schemers are concentrating into their own hands the money of the nation, and that this concentration can have no other result than the abject slavery of the American people.

END OF VOLUME

LAWSON AND HIS CRITICS

I

THE INSURANCE CONTROVERSY

In the July, 1904, number of _Everybody's Magazine_ I announced that I proposed to give to the world a story concerned with events which had taken place in real life--a true story.

I outlined it, giving the names of the persons and events it would deal with.

These things happened:

The edition of the magazine was sold out in three days; my chapter was printed in part or in full in nearly all the papers and periodicals of the United States and Canada; many of the representative journals, even in England, published long editorials on the subject, and with but few exceptions, editorials and news comments were favorable.

I was urged to continue. My second chapter appeared.

The magazine, with an additional 100,000 copies, was sold out in two days. The press took hold of the matter with even greater interest than it had accorded my first chapter.

The third chapter met with a still more cordial reception. The edition of the magazine, although increased another 100,000, sold out as before, and my mail expanded to a degree that surprised me. In addition to thousands of press notices and criticisms, I received ever so many letters from all cla.s.ses of Americans and Canadians--teachers of the Word of G.o.d, and members of the flocks who are taught, earnest statesmen and insincere politicians, millionnaires and paupers, anarchists, socialists, munic.i.p.al-owners.h.i.+pists, and the hundred and one travelers on the beaten highways and lowways of life, who, spurred by ambition or unrest, pantingly seek a chance to blaze a way for the trudging millions of the future to that goal of all ambitious and restless dreamers--a people's Utopia. Nearly all appealed to me to give them the word as to the ultimate intention of "Frenzied Finance"--"Is it only to point to the sores, or will it p.r.i.c.k them with its long sharp point and will its double edge cut the flesh in which they are rooted?" Others required further information or explanation about the subjects I had treated; another section questioned my statements and found fault with my disclosures. The volume of these communications and criticisms finally became so large and they were so urgent in tone that I made up my mind it was necessary to devise some fair and intelligent way to remove the writers' difficulties and resolve their doubts. The modern surgeon finds the preparation of a patient who is to go under the knife as important as the operation itself. My readers, unacquainted with the intricate details of finance and confused by the angry outcries and denials of those I had attacked, required education _en route_ to be able to absorb and digest the hard facts and strong statements I was dealing out to them in monthly instalments. My publishers agreed with me as to the necessity of dealing in some radical way with the emergency, and devoted to my service additional pages in the back of _Everybody's Magazine_.

Here I decided to begin a department to be called "Lawson and His Critics" in which I would solve the knotty problems my correspondents presented to me, set right their misunderstandings, and reply fully to those critics who had aspersed my motives or were attempting to discredit my message.

I began the department in October, 1904, and though I have been most seriously pressed for time, and in many instances have dealt imperfectly with the problems treated, I must say that the task I set myself has proved interesting and agreeable, and the letters the department evoked have been a tremendous source of inspiration and encouragement to me along the hail-stony road I had set myself to travel.

The bulk of the department during the months of 1904 was devoted to the subject of insurance. In an early chapter of my story I said that the three great insurance corporations, the New York Life, the Equitable, and the Mutual Life of New York, were an integral part of the "System,"

and especially instanced the New York Life as one of the most pliable tools of the "Made Dollar" makers. This statement, so mild and so vague in view of subsequent developments, was the first move in the historic controversy that has resulted in the extraordinary exposures that are being made as this book goes to press. When that first pebble was thrown, the surface of the insurance pond was as placid as a mountain lake, unruffled by a ripple, and in it were reflected the benignant faces of the n.o.ble philanthropists who consented to spend their days conserving the interests of the widows and the orphans of America. The people had grown so accustomed to regarding the McCalls, the Perkinses, the Hydes, the McCurdys, and the Alexanders, whose eminent physiognomies looked out at them from their insurance policies, as lofty and generous souls far removed from thoughts of pelf or self-aggrandizement, that my a.s.sertion caused consternation such as would occur in a Chinese temple if some rough intruder struck the idol, before whom a congregation was wors.h.i.+pping, with a stone. At once an avalanche of letters--protests, demands for further facts, anxious appeals from policy-holders--poured in upon me, and frankly I took up the subject, giving my readers exactly what they desired.

NEW HAMPs.h.i.+RE TRACTION

In order that the controversy may be unfolded in the manner in which it was first given to the public, I give here the first letter of the series, and then follow directly along with those pa.s.sages from succeeding numbers that are devoted to the subject:

BUFFALO, N. Y., August 25, 1904.

MR. THOMAS W. LAWSON, Boston, Ma.s.s.

_Dear Sir_: I have been astounded beyond measure at the revelations you make in your second article regarding the New York Life Insurance Company, because I have two policies in that concern which I am keeping up for the protection of my family. My confidence in the company has been shaken by your revelations, and I wonder if much more can be said.

Perhaps it is best for clean life insurance to tell all now--the rest will be the better for it. Do you really believe the officers of the company personally profited from using the "cash on hand" of the company? Go on in your exposure; you are doing a meritorious work, and we poor devils, plodders, will never cease to thank you for your work. Should like to have you intimate if anything more about New York Life is coming.

Yours truly, ---- ----

To this I replied: I desire to emphasize that the New York Life Insurance Company, which I cited, is no different from the Equitable and the Mutual Life, or many of the other large companies. They are links in the chain of the "System"--necessary links in the device by which dollars are "made," by which the savings of the people are sucked from the people to the "System," the "Private Things."

I will, later in my story, dwell upon this tremendous phase of this stupendous question, and will only say at the present time, as an answer to such questions as "Buffalo's": The insurance companies use the billions the people have placed with them to buy or create banks and trust companies, the stocks of which are a large part of their a.s.sets.