i have, in previous chapters, touched very briefly upon some of the vile excrescences that have found a resting place within the gates of our once so fair city of society. again, i have sketched in the briefest outline the process by which the idle class was created. i have shown how the seed was planted in the too fertile soil of american industry. i have dwelt, but briefly, upon the simple fact that we of the older orders have come to find out something about that planting and the manner of the growth.
i turn with something like dismay from a sketch of the methods of the culture of134 this growth. for it is watered with the bloody sweat of labour and the salt tears of bitter poverty and suffering; and it is fertilized with the dead bodies of men and women outworn in the grim battle of life. tended and watched it is by a foul horde of underlings, hired judges in the law, panders in politics, prostitutes in the pulpit, lickspittles in college chancelleries, judases in the press, blackmailers in business, and miserable, time-serving parasites clinging like filthy leeches upon the administrative bodies of the nation.
to my mind, as i have studied this question, there has come a sad conviction: this nation is betrayed. the planting of the seed of our industrial system, whose fine flower has been reached in our class of idle rich, was quite possible without any betrayal of the people. even its growth135 for two decades was possible without a conscious effort on the part of the keepers of the public citadels to throw open the doors to a public enemy. may a thinking man dare to say that the growth of this system since 1890 could have been possible without criminal negligence on the part of those public servants sworn to guard the true and lawful interests of the people of this nation?
for it was perfectly evident, years ago, that the industrial evolution of this country was a process of exploitation. it was the knowledge of this fact that lay behind the sherman law of 1890; and again the interstate commerce act, which sought to restrain, to a limited extent at least, the boundless license to plunder which had been taken unto themselves by the railroads. no broad-minded man can read136 with an open mind the facts with regard to the homestead strike, the pullman strike, the war in the cœur d’alene, or the coal strike of very recent years, without coming to the conclusion that no matter who was in the wrong in the immediate circumstances leading to those national catastrophes, the real underlying cause was a revolt on the part of a subjugated people against the hardships of industrial slavery.
without going into details, let us examine, in the light of history, a few of the cardinal facts that have so far made possible a continuance, indeed, a constant widening and deepening, of this process of exploitation. let us remember always, as we face the facts, that the primary cause of this condition lay in that evolution, which was probably inevitable, from the household137 stage of manufacturing in this country to the stage that is represented by the modern trust. that evolution stands to-day completed. it was, as a matter of fact, completed on the day when the american sugar refining company assumed the dominating position in the sugar trade. subsequent developments have been but a repetition, sometimes on a larger scale, sometimes on a smaller, of that climax. what, then, makes possible the continuance of this process in the face of the ever-growing public knowledge of its existence?
the answer is our public shame. this process, openly recognized by the public, thoroughly analyzed day by day and year by year by brilliant writers in press and periodical, exposed again and again in excellently written books by college economists,138 has gone on and on through climax after climax for the simple reason that the one power in the world that could stop it—the will of the american people—has been turned from its purpose, defeated in its honest efforts, and betrayed in its administration, through the fact that in our democratic political world the power of mobilized wealth has been sufficient to restrain the hands of our political parties and prevent the striking of the blows that would have put an end to the process. to-day, in america, the people elect their statesmen; but the exercise of the people’s power through these statesmen is curbed, directed, and controlled by groups of moneyed interests. this is a statement that many will challenge; it is a statement that cannot be proved or disproved. i give it as my opinion, based upon long,139 careful study, and based, too, on personal knowledge.
america, then, is a plutocracy. always politically, the power of a plutocracy depends upon the maintenance of the status quo. it has come into being through the operation of certain industrial or commercial conditions. it lives by virtue of the continuance of those conditions, and by virtue of their freedom from attack by the one power strong enough to destroy them—namely, the people.
to maintain this status quo has been the gigantic task successfully carried out by the financial interests of the united states. it is not my intention—indeed, it is not within my power—to go into any complete details of the methods and machinery used for this end. it has not all been accomplished, by any means, through direct political corruption, though much of it has been accomplished in that way. the few scattered and unimportant instances of conviction are enough by themselves, without going into surmise at all, to establish the fact that in almost every state of the union, and at the seat of the central government itself, there has been for thirty years past widespread corruption of political parties.
deeper than this, more sinister even than the most recent example of an administrative officer bound like a slave to the wheel of his master’s chariot, has been the indirect subornation of public opinion through a subsidized press, subsidized pulpits, and subsidized public speakers. we have heard a great deal of demagogues and wicked socialistic leaders of the mob. we do not hear much of that other phenomenon, the oily sycophant who talks to the people with words of cheer and paragraphs of exhortation, having in his mind always the one single idea how best he may serve the moneyed interests that stand behind him.
it is strange to me, and it has always been strange to other men who have studied these things, that the interests of a plutocracy can be so long maintained; for a plutocracy, of its very nature, is the weakest possible form of government. it lives either by force or by fraud. it lived in rome before the days of marius by force alone; and the lower orders of rome were slaves. it lived in paris before the terror, by a combination of force and fraud; and the lower orders of france became fiendish brutes. it lives in america by fraud alone; and what may we say of the people of this nation who permit it to live?
for, strange and incongruous as it may seem, a plutocracy rarely if ever develops a real leader save in the crisis of its lifetime. in rome, as ferrero so well points out in his book, “the greatness and decline of rome,” sulla came into his leadership of the plutocracy only after the people in the person of marius had seized from the hands of the plutocracy all the power of government. in france, the plutocracy absolutely failed to develop a leader. in england to-day, almost in the dawn of a revolution, the propertied classes lack a single person of commanding power. in america, no single man, no group of men, represent in their persons the power of the plutocracy.
it is the tendency of the great and wealthy to divide into rival camps. for some years past, in the one single subdivision of the143 world of wealth that is represented by wall street finance, there have been at least two great leaders of the golden host, bitterly antagonistic, fiercely at odds, each striving to draw to himself new reinforcements, not with the idea of strengthening the world of money as a whole, but rather with the single idea of building up his own power to break down or destroy the power of other leaders in that world. to-day, in this single section of the world of business, there seems to be but one man who stands like a giant among pygmies. far more nearly than any other in our history does he, in his magnificent personal power and his splendid executive wisdom, approach the magnitude of a real leader in a plutocracy.
in the political world it is physically next to impossible that any man can arise144 in a country where the people vote who will be able to assume at once political power as a servant of the people and plutocratic rule as a representative of moneyed interests. in the never-ceasing conflict between the people and their exploiters no man by serving two sides can achieve greatness. therefore, the wealthy classes of america have never sought, and are not seeking to-day, leaders from the political arena. in that arena, it is true, they have chosen to associate themselves, from time to time, with men who, through their ability or through the public confidence reposed in then, exercise great political authority. in that way, more than by any other, the plutocracy of america has maintained the status quo; but every citizen of the united states who in his own mind is persuaded that this is true of any one man145 who can be named in the political world despises that man, contemns his authority, and sets him down in the list of a nation’s traitors.
it is a losing fight, this struggle of a plutocracy against a people. against organized political opposition in a free country, where citizens have a right to vote, it must crumble into dust when once the people seriously begin the organization of political opposition. for how different is the position of the people from the position of a plutocracy in the matter of individual leadership! never in the history of the world, in any but a nation of slaves, have the people lacked a leader. marius in rome, danton and robespierre in paris, cromwell in england, you may multiply the list a hundred fold if you care to study the pages of history. in all ages, leaders like this, when146 once they are fired with enthusiasm for a cause, have been able, when they cared to do so, to strike out policies direct and strong, and to lead the minds of the people as they willed. such lines of political cleavage as these do not transpire easily. in almost every case in history there has been transition only through war, riot, and revolution. we need a leader. he will surely come.
in this country, already, opposition exists. labour union parties, reform parties, socialistic parties, have come into being, faded away, and died. to-day, the only independent party working in the political world of the united states is so inextricably bound up with and wedded to a host of economic fallacies that the sober common sense of the american people as a whole, feeling as they do that the147 great political parties of the country are hopelessly inefficient and corrupt, will not endorse it.
we have not yet in this country marked out clearly the line of political cleavage along which the mighty rift must be made. perhaps one may find the first faint tracings of it in the rise of the insurgents in the last session of congress. from what i have learned of the sentiment in the powerful middle west, which more than any other part of the union represents an average of the people of the united states, i am more than half convinced that this is true. if it be so, many things may happen within the next few years, and there may be very good reason indeed for the wide spread of uneasiness in the plutocracy.
i am not a politician. i look at this148 matter of political power much as any other sober american business man looks at it. among my own people i seldom hear purely political discussions. when we are discussing pro and con the relative merits of candidates or the relative importance of political policies, the discussion almost invariably comes down to a question of business efficiency. we care absolutely nothing about statehood bills, pension agitation, waterway appropriations, “pork barrels,” state rights, or any other political question, save inasmuch as it threatens or fortifies existing business conditions. touch the question of the tariff, touch the issue of the income tax, touch the problem of railroad regulation, or touch that most vital of all business matters, the question of general federal regulation of industrial corporations, and the people amongst whom149 i live my life become immediately rabid partisans.
it matters not one iota what political party is in power, or what president holds the reins of office. we are not politicians, or public thinkers; we are the rich; we own america; we got it, god knows how; but we intend to keep it if we can by throwing all the tremendous weight of our support, our influence, our money, our political connection, our purchased senators, our hungry congressmen, and our public-speaking demagogues into the scale against any legislation, any political platform, any presidential campaign, that threatens the integrity of our estate.
i have said that the class i represent cares nothing for politics. in a single season a plutocratic leader hurled his influence and his money into the scale to150 elect a republican governor on the pacific coast, and a democratic governor on the atlantic. the same moneyed interest that he represented has held undisputed sway through many administrations, republican and democratic, in a state in which it had large railroad interests. judge lindsey, in his latest book, “the beast,” has shown in indisputable detail how the corporation interests of denver played with both great political parties. truly can i say that wealth has no politics save its own interests.
“poverty is a bitter thing, but it is not as bitter as the existence of restless vacuity and physical, moral, and intellectual flabbiness to which those doom themselves who elect to spend all their years in that vainest of all pursuits, the pursuit of mere pleasure as a sufficient end in itself.”
—theodore roosevelt.
