Frenzied Finance Part 54

most profitable inst.i.tutions. I find I have not s.p.a.ce here to reproduce these several mud broadsides, which really are more valuable as evidence of the doddering imbecility and fatuous weakness of the so-called great men of finance than interesting or informative. Since my personality is the issue, I propose to give my readers some testimony of a different character, gathered by experts[22] in the heat of battle.

THOMAS W. LAWSON AT CLOSE RANGE

AN INTIMATE TALK WITH THE FINANCIER AND FIGHTER

BY ARTHUR McEWEN

From the _New York American_, November 27, 1904.

Thomas W. Lawson of Boston, who is making it so interesting for Standard Oil financiers and other able gentlemen that add your money to their corpulent millions while you wait, is himself an interesting man and a very puzzling one to a great many people.

One day last week I spent several hours with him at his rooms in Young's Hotel, and it surely was a stimulating and enjoyable time. Everybody now knows how exceedingly well Mr.

Lawson can write, and he talks as he writes--boldly, vividly, audaciously. He thinks out loud, pouring forth a flood of speech, breaking off in the middle of sentences, going into long parentheses, touching on a dozen incidental things by way of ill.u.s.tration as he goes, but always coming back to the main point. He may confuse you, but he does not confuse himself. And notwithstanding the rapidity of his utterance and his copiousness he is not carried away into saying what he would rather not have said.

He is handsome--tall, broad-shouldered, strong, well-knit, and graceful--still almost youthful physically, despite his forty-five years and the beginning of grayness in the dark, wavy hair which covers his large, finely arched, and well-proportioned head. His forehead is high and broad, his gray eyes deep set under brows that come together and give intentness and fierceness to his gaze when he is aroused.

And when Lawson is aroused you see a fighter with all his wits about him and of utter fearlessness. He would have made a first-cla.s.s soldier, with his quickness and dash and the pluck that was born in him, and has not to be summoned by thinking and resolving.

THE BOSTON VIEW OF LAWSON

The Boston view of Lawson is illuminating. They are afraid of him on State Street. He thinks so rapidly and does things with such instant decision that he bewilders the conventional plodders. They admit that he is brilliant, that he has a genius for gathering in the dollars, but he shocks the financial Mrs. Grundy. They tell you that he is "irregular," "sensational," "bizarre," and the rest of it--all of which means simply that he is a man of original mind, who follows his own methods, succeeds with them, and doesn't care a snap of his fingers about being out of the fas.h.i.+on.

He has a hundred ideas and impulses where the "safe and steady-going" business man has one--and as the safe and steady-going State-Streeter doesn't understand the ninety-nine Lawson ideas and impulses which do not come to him, he charges them up to "eccentricity" and "charlatanism."

Boston says Lawson is vain. He certainly does hold a good opinion of himself, and he has a right to. A boy who goes into a bank at twelve as he did and before he is seventeen cleans up $60,000 is hardly to be rebuked for considering that he is better fitted for the financial game than most.

He knows life, he knows men. He has made and lost fortunes and is not afraid of being "broke."

That experience has been his repeatedly, but always he rose again. His brains, energy, and daring would cause him to rise anywhere. Had he been given birth in a South American republic, the dictators.h.i.+p would have been his inevitably.

Lawson was born a money-maker, but he is a great deal more than that. He is a many-sided man, interested ardently in lots of things to which the ordinary money-maker is oblivious. He is very, very human. He has a soul.

Although he is raining blows on important men, who are not accustomed to being treated with disrespect--although he is charging them with crimes, and hopes, I should say, to drive them out of the country or into the penitentiary, he speaks of some of them with the greatest kindness, thoroughly understanding their good personal qualities.

THE WONDERFUL ROGERS

He denounces H. H. Rogers, for example, as a robber, a criminal, and he said to me:

"Rogers is a marvellously able man and one of the best fellows living. If you knew him only on the social side, and knew him for years, you couldn't help loving him. He is considerate, kindly, generous, helpful, and everything a man should be to his friends. But when it comes to business--his kind of business--when he turns away from his better self and goes aboard his pirate brig and hoists the _Jolly Rover_, G.o.d help you! And, then, as a buccaneer you have to admire him, for he is a master among pirates, and you have to salute him, even when he has the point of his cutla.s.s at the small of your back and you're walking the plank at his order. Rogers is wonderful. He is one of the most prolific human creatures I have ever met; prolific in thought, in devices--and I've been at the game a long time now and ought to know.

"Don't think me egotistical, but I can't help looking under the surface and going to the bottom of things. So I learn more about men in Wall Street and what they are at than most. This is my thirty-fourth year of sixteen and seventeen hours a day and three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, and I have seen them all come and go. I _am_ with the third generation of my time now. In such matters I feel somehow that I'm about three hundred years old.

"Men like Rogers are all very good fellows. They are genial and tolerant in their judgment of others. Yes, they are mighty good fellows, until you turn them around and look at their other side. Rogers is lovable enough until he touches the other b.u.t.ton. Then he goes with perfect ruthlessness for what he wants. And yet, though you are his victim, you can't bring yourself to hate him. After he has thrown you down and taken all you have and you turn yourself over and find the dark lantern has disappeared, and you hear him going up the lane, you pick yourself out of the gutter and admire the skill with which he did the job. If you could stand it, you would almost whistle to have him come back and do it over."

"It is easy to see," I said, "by what you write of Mr.

Rogers in your magazine story, that you were fond of him and gave him the highest rank for ability, but just the same you said you had to go on the stand in the gas suit and swear exactly opposite to his testimony. Do you charge him flatly with perjury?"

"I have put it fifty times in black and white," answered Mr.

Lawson, "that he committed perjury. There isn't any question about it. I produced my secretary's minutes, delivered over the telephone, received by his secretary and afterward confirmed. He confirmed the message to me, called me up and talked it over and did business on that agreement. Two men, Rogers and myself, followed each other on the stand and made diametrically opposite statements; and neither one of them reserved himself in stating that it was knowledge at first hand. Therefore there was perjury."

LEGISLATIVE CORRUPTION

"Mr. Lawson, the whole country is familiar enough with legislative corruption, so there's nothing new in your charge that the Legislature of Ma.s.sachusetts was bought up.

But what will attract national notice is the definiteness of your accusation. You charge H.M. Whitney, brother of the late W. C. Whitney, and one of the foremost business men of your State, with having done the corrupting in order to get through a complete charter for a gas company. Now, when you pillory a person of Whitney's standing and prominence, as you have done, he has got to do one of two things--either force you to come to the front and compel you to prove the truth of what you say or stand before the public morally convicted."

"That's right," agreed Lawson heartily.

"Do you stand ready to prove your charge if he challenges you to do it?"

"What else can I do? Of course I can prove it. I'm sorry for Whitney. He is a good fellow on his personal side, like Rogers, but truth is truth."

"However used we may have become to buying Legislatures, however commonplace it may be, still, when a financially responsible man like yourself gives concrete instance, and is prepared with proofs, the fact is horribly startling to everybody that cares for his country. What is to be the end of this sort of thing--the purchase of the people's representatives by the criminal rich?"

"Well, you can ask me a question even broader than that.

What is going to be the end, not only of such things as I have stated in regard to the corruption of the Legislature of Ma.s.sachusetts--and we all admit that the same thing is being done in other States--what is going to be the outcome of this rottenness in connection with the practices in Wall Street that I am telling about in my magazine narrative in 'Frenzied Finance'? To answer would be to disclose my remedy--the climax to my whole story. At present I can only say that I make no charges loosely, on insufficient evidence. I state only what I know. I have seen the iniquities worked out. I know that these crimes are being committed every day; that these great financial schemes are carried through, not only by the commission of moral crimes, but legal crimes--crimes for which those partic.i.p.ating in them can be held responsible if they are gone after in the right way, and I am going to show the right way.

THE REMEDY

"I believe that I have a remedy. That, of course, is a tremendous thing to say. I have spent my life on it. I have been waiting for the opportunity."

"I may not ask you what your remedy is?"

"No, I shall propose that myself when I have laid all my facts about these crimes before the people. I am going to tell them about some startling crimes. All that I have told so far, including the systematic corruption of the Ma.s.sachusetts Legislature, relates to the past. That is, the deeds are dead, so to speak. But the crimes of Amalgamated, though in one sense they are now past, are yet connected with the present, because Amalgamated is alive. The man who was robbed in 1899, in 1900, and 1901 has his claim unsettled. That man is alive and Amalgamated is a big, living corporation. When I get to that I shall be talking in the present and something is going to be done.

"I have the remedy for the whole thing. You will appreciate the largeness of that statement, but I have thought and advised and worked it out. My remedy is based on common sense."

"Does it aim at any real change in our political system? Is it socialistic?"

"Oh, no; it doesn't mean a turning over in politics. You and I know that the dollar is what is running things in this country to-day, and if you come along with an ideal proposition--a proposition that carries with it a change in our laws or a proposition to have some new laws pa.s.sed--you might as well say good-by to it, because the fellow whose hundred millions you want to take away is going to say: 'How many dollars does it need to turn that upside down?' and he is going to supply the dollars."

LAWSON'S VERSATILITY

Mr. Lawson gave me nearly three hours of his time, and during those three hours he was interrupted every five minutes or so by telephone calls. He conducted his business right along, ordering the selling and buying of stocks, making or declining appointments, talking with his publishers, his lawyers, his family, his friends. It would have goaded almost any man into excitement and irritability, but it was all in a day's work with Lawson. Yet he is not phlegmatic; indeed, he is extraordinarily animated. But it is animation with composure. In a business way there is not a busier man in the country, but he finds leisure for other interests--books, pictures, bronzes, horses. He has a beautiful country home, where he goes daily by special train, and then puts up the bars against business, bores, and all intruders.

In his talk with me he ran a remarkable gamut. He spoke of business like the shrewdest and readiest of practical men.

Then in the midst of some story of stock-market guile, such as he is exposing in _Everybody's Magazine_, his face, voice, and hands conveyed amus.e.m.e.nt, anger, disgust. With his good looks and gift of expression he would have made his way to the top of the stage. I do not know if he has done any public speaking. But when he got into the full tide of denunciation of the crimes of Amalgamated I regretted that he was not addressing a great audience, for it was real oratory--strong talk, ardent, electric, manly. His eyes flashed, his teeth came together with a snap and he shook both fists under my nose. He has enthusiasm, capacity for righteous wrath, and the spirit of battle. But he doesn't lose poise for a moment.

HIS CONFIDENCE IN HIMSELF

Cheerfulness, gay confidence in his own powers, is his predominant trait.

"You are firing hot shot into these people," I said. "They have endless money, and you are in the stock-market, taking chances every day. Aren't you afraid they will dig pits for you?"

"Well, what can they do to any of us in this world except to send us to the poor-house or the grave? I don't fear them. I know them and all about them. You must remember this is not a new occupation with me. For twenty-five years or more I have been in the habit of picking up a brick without looking to see how many corners it had or whether it was round or square and hitting the first head I thought I had a good reason to hit. I have been doing these things regardless of how they liked it. It's upward of a quarter of a century since I had my first wrestle with a corporation in the newspapers. I have tried not to be a common scold and avoided being vicious when I could. I have only attacked when I thought some fellow had done me a deliberate wrong.

And when I have felt that way I have started after him. Then it has been vicious, hard fighting, you know; vicious, but not malicious.

"With the 'Standard Oil' crowd I have this big advantage--I am only one man, a small target, and it needs a mighty good aim to hit me, whereas they present a large surface and I have only to heave a brick in any direction to break a window. The contest is unequal. Everything favors me. My ammunition is the truth."

There is cheerful courage for you--more particularly in the case of a man who proclaims from the housetop that there is no limit to the villainy of his adversaries.