SOME ASPECTS OF AMERICAN WEALTH
I
The Spenders
It is obvious that in a community that has disavowed aristocracy or
rule and subordination or service, which has granted unparalleled
freedoms to property and despised and distrusted the state, the chief
business of life will consist in getting or attempting to get. But the
chief aspect of American life that impinges first upon the European
is not this, but the behavior of a certain overflow at the top, of
people who have largely and triumphantly got, and with hand, pockets,
safe-deposit vaults full of dollars, are proceeding to realize victory.
Before I came to America it was in his capacity of spender that I
chiefly knew the American; as a person who had demoralized Regent
Street and the Rue de Rivoli, who had taught the London cabman to
demand "arf a dollar" for a shilling fare, who bought old books and
old castles, and had driven the prices of old furniture to incredible
altitudes, and was slowly transferring our incubus of artistic
achievement to American soil. One of my friends in London is Mr. X,
who owns those two houses full of fine "pieces" near the British Museum
and keeps his honor unsullied in the most deleterious of trades. "They
come to me," he said, "and ask me to buy for them. It's just buying.
One of them wants to beat the silver of another, doesn't care what
he pays. Another clamors for tapestry. They trust me as they trust a
doctor. There's no understanding--no feeling. It's hard to treat them
well."
And there is the story of Y, who is wise about pictures. "If you want
a Botticelli that size, Mr. Record, I can't find it," he said; "you'll
have to have it made for you."
These American spenders have got the whole world "beat" at the foolish
game of collecting, and in all the peculiar delights of shopping they
excel. And they are the crown and glory of hotel managers throughout
the world. There is something naïve, something childishly expectant
and acquisitive, about this aspect of American riches. There appears
no aristocracy in their tradition, no sense of permanence and
great responsibility, there appears no sense of subordination and
service; from the individualistic business struggle they have emerged
triumphant, and what is there to do now but spend and have a good time?
They swarm in the pleasant places of the Riviera, they pervade Paris
and Rome, they occupy Scotch castles and English estates, their
motor-cars are terrible and wonderful. And the London Savoy Hotel still
flaunts its memory of one splendid American night. The court-yard was
flooded with water tinted an artistic blue--to the great discomfort of
the practically inevitable gold-fish, and on this floated a dream of
a gondola. And in the gondola the table was spread and served by the
Savoy staff, mysteriously disguised in appropriate fancy costume. The
whole thing--there's only two words for it--was "perfectly lovely."
"The illusion"--whatever that was--we are assured, was complete. It
wasn't a nursery treat, you know. The guests, I am told, were important
grown-up people.
This sort of childishness, of course, has nothing distinctively
American in it. Any people of sluggish and uneducated imagination who
find themselves profusely wealthy, and are too stupid to understand the
huge moral burden, the burden of splendid possibilities it carries,
may do things of this sort. It was not Americans but a party of
South-African millionaires who achieved the kindred triumph of the
shirt-and-belt dinner under a tent in a London hotel dining-room. The
glittering procession of carriages and motor-carriages which I watched
driving down Fifth Avenue, New York, apparently for the pleasure
of driving up again, is to be paralleled on the Pincio, in Naples,
in Paris, and anywhere where irresponsible pleasure-seekers gather
together. After the naïve joy of buying things comes the joy of
wearing them publicly, the simple pleasure of the promenade. These
things are universals. But nowhere has this spending struck me as
being so solid and substantial, so nearly twenty-two carats fine, as
here. The shops have an air of solid worth, are in the key of butlers,
bishops, opera-boxes, high-class florists, powdered footmen, Roman
beadles, motor-broughams, to an extent that altogether outshines either
Paris or London.
[Illustration: PLUMP AND PRETTY PUPILS OF EXTRAVAGANCE]
And in such great hotels as the Waldorf-Astoria, one finds the new
arrivals, the wives and daughters from the West and the South, in
new, bright hats, and splendors of costume, clubbed together, under
the discreetest management, for this and that, learning how to spend
collectively, reaching out to assemblies, to dinners. From an observant
tea-table beneath the fronds of a palm, I surveyed a fine array of
these plump and pretty pupils of extravagance. They were for the
most part quite brilliantly as well as newly dressed, and with an
artless and pleasing unconsciousness of the living from inside. Smart
innocents! I found all that gathering most contagiously interested and
happy and fresh.
And I watched spending, too, as one sees it in the various incompatible
houses of upper Fifth Avenue and along the border of Central Park.
That, too, suggests a shop, a shop where country houses are sold and
stored; there is the Tiffany house, a most expensive-looking article,
on the shelf, and the Carnegie house. There had been no pretence on
the part of the architects that any house belonged in any sense to any
other, that any sort of community held them together. The link is just
spending. You come to New York and spend; you go away again. To some of
these palaces people came and went; others had their blinds down and
conveyed a curious effect of a sunlit child excursionist in a train who
falls asleep and droops against his neighbor. One of the Vanderbilt
houses was frankly and brutally boarded up. Newport, I am told, takes
up and carries on the same note of magnificent irresponsibility, and
there one admires the richest forms of simplicity, triumphs of villa
architecture in thatch, and bathing bungalows in marble....
There exists already, of these irresponsible American rich, a splendid
group of portraits, done without extenuation and without malice, in
the later work of that great master of English fiction, Mr. Henry
James. There one sees them at their best, their refinement, their large
wealthiness, their incredible unreality. I think of _The Ambassadors_
and that mysterious source of the income of the Newcomes, a mystery
that, with infinite artistic tact, was never explained; but more I
think of _The Golden Bowl_, most spacious and serene of novels.
In that splendid and luminous bubble, the Prince Amerigo and Maggie
Verver, Mr. Verver, that assiduous collector, and the adventurous
Charlotte Stant float far above a world of toil and anxiety, spending
with a large refinement, with a perfected assurance and precision. They
spend as flowers open. But this is the quintessence, the sublimation,
the idealization of the rich American. Few have the restraint for
this. For the rest, when one has shopped and shopped, and collected
and bought everything, and promenaded on foot, in motor-car and
motor-brougham and motor-boat, in yacht and special train; when one
has a fine house here and a fine house there, and photography and the
special article have exhausted admiration, there remains chiefly that
one broader and more presumptuous pleasure--spending to give. American
givers give most generously, and some of them, it must be admitted,
give well. But they give individually, incoherently, each pursuing a
personal ideal. There are unsuccessful givers....
American cities are being littered with a disorder of unsystematized
foundations and picturesque legacies, much as I find my nursery floor
littered with abandoned toys and battles and buildings when the
children are in bed after a long, wet day. Yet some of the gifts are
very splendid things. There is, for example, the Leland Stanford Junior
University in California, a vast monument of parental affection and
Richardsonian architecture, with professors, and teaching going on in
its interstices; and there is Mrs. Gardner's delightful Fenway Court,
a Venetian palace, brought almost bodily from Italy and full of finely
gathered treasures....
All this giving is, in its aggregate effect, as confused as industrial
Chicago. It presents no clear scheme of the future, promises no growth;
it is due to the impulsive generosity of a mob of wealthy persons, with
no broad common conceptions, with no collective dream, with little to
hold them together but imitation and the burning possession of money;
the gifts overlap, they lie at any angle, one with another. Some are
needless, some mischievous. There are great gaps of unfulfilled need
between.
And through the multitude of lesser, though still mighty, givers, comes
that colossus of property, Mr. Andrew Carnegie, the jubilee plunger of
beneficence, that rosy, gray-haired, nimble little figure, going to
and fro between two continents, scattering library buildings as if he
sowed wild oats, buildings that may or may not have some educational
value, if presently they are reorganized and properly stocked with
books. Anon he appals the thrifty burgesses of Dunfermline with vast
and uncongenial responsibilities of expenditure; anon he precipitates
the library of the late Lord Acton upon our embarrassed Mr. Morley;
anon he pauperizes the students of Scotland. He diffuses his monument
throughout the English-speaking lands, amid circumstances of the
most flagrant publicity; the receptive learned, the philanthropic
noble, bow in expectant swaths before him. He is the American fable
come true; nothing seems too wild to believe of him, and he fills the
European imagination with an altogether erroneous conception of the
self-dissipating quality in American wealth.
II
The Astor Fortune
Because, now, as a matter of fact, dissipation is by no means the
characteristic quality of American getting. The good American will
indeed tell you solemnly that in America it is three generations "from
shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves"; but this has about as much truth in
it as that remarkable absence of any pure-bred Londoners of the third
generation, dear to the British imagination.
Amid the vast yeasty tumult of American business, of the getting and
losing which are the main life of this community, nothing could be
clearer than the steady accumulation of great masses of property that
show no signs of disintegrating again. The very rich people display
an indisposition to divide their estates; the Marshall Field estate
in Chicago, for example, accumulates; the Jay Gould inheritance
survives great strains. And when first I heard that "shirt-sleeves to
shirt-sleeves" proverb, Which is so fortifying a consolation to the
older school of Americans, my mind flew back to the Thames Embankment,
as one sees it from the steamboat on the river. There, just eastward of
the tall red Education offices of the London County Council, stands a
quite graceful and decorative little building of gray stone, that jars
not at all with the fine traditions of the adjacent Temple, but catches
the eye, nevertheless, with its very big, very gilded vane in the form
of a ship. This is the handsome strong-box to which New York pays
gigantic yearly tribute, the office in which Mr. W.W. Astor conducts
his affairs. They are not his private and individual affairs, but the
affairs of the estate of the late J.J. Astor--still undivided, and
still growing year by year.
Mr. Astor seems to me to be a much more representative figure of
American wealth than any of the conspicuous spenders who strike so
vividly upon the European imagination. His is the most retiring of
personalities. In this picturesque stone casket he works; his staff
works under his cognizance, and administers, I know not to what ends
nor to what extent, revenues that exceed those of many sovereign
states. He himself is impressed by it, and, without arrogance, he makes
a visit to his offices, with a view of its storage vaults, its halls of
disciplined clerks, a novel and characteristic form of entertainment.
For the rest, Mr. Astor leads a life of modest affluence, and recreates
himself with the genealogy of his family, short stories about treasure
lost and found, and such like literary work.
Now here you have wealth with, as it were, the minimum of ownership,
as indeed owning its possessor. Nobody seems to be spending that huge
income the crowded enormity of New York squeezes out. The "Estate of
the late J.J. Astor" must be accumulating more wealth and still more;
under careful and systematic management must be rolling up like a
golden snowball under that golden weather-vane. In the most accidental
relation to its undistinguished, harmless, arithmetical proprietor!
Your anarchist orator or your crude socialist is always talking of the
rich as blood-suckers, robbers, robber-barons, _grafters_ and so on.
It really is nonsense to talk like that. In the presence of Mr. W.W.
Astor these preposterous accusations answer themselves. The thing is
a logical outcome of the assumptions about private property on which
our contemporary civilization is based, and Mr. Astor, for all that
he draws gold from New York as effectually as a ferret draws blood
from a rabbit, is indeed the most innocent of men. He finds himself
in a certain position, and he sits down very congenially and adds and
adds and adds, and relieves the tedium of his leisure in literary
composition. Had he been born at the level of a dry-goods clerk he
would probably have done the same sort of thing on a smaller scale,
and it would have been the little Poddlecombe literary society, and
not the _Pall Mall Magazine_, that would have been the richer for his
compositions. It is just the scale of the circumstances that differs....
III
The Chief Getters
The lavish spending of Fifth Avenue and Paris and Rome and Mayfair is
but the flower, the often brilliant, the sometimes gaudy flower of
the American economic process; and such slow and patient accumulators
as Mr. Astor the rounding and ripening fruit. One need be only a
little while in America to realize this, and to discern the branch and
leaf, and at last even the aggressive insatiable spreading root of
aggregating property, that was liberated so effectually when America
declared herself free.
The group of people that attracts the largest amount of attention in
press and talk, that most obsesses the American imagination, and that
is indeed the most significant at the present time, is the little
group--a few score men perhaps altogether--who are emerging distinctly
as winners in that great struggle to get, into which this commercial
industrialism has naturally resolved itself. Central among them are
the men of the Standard Oil group, the "octopus" which spreads its
ramifying tentacles through the whole system of American business,
absorbing and absorbing, grasping and growing. The extraordinarily able
investigations of such writers as Miss Tarbell and Ray Stannard Baker,
the rhetorical exposures of Mr. T.W. Lawson, have brought out the
methods and quality of this group of persons with a particularity that
has been reserved heretofore for great statesmen and crowned heads, and
with an unflattering lucidity altogether unprecedented. Not only is
every hair on their heads numbered, but the number is published. They
are known to their pettiest weaknesses and to their most accidental
associations. And in this astonishing blaze of illumination they
continue steadfastly to get.
These men, who are creating the greatest system of correlated private
properties in the world, who are wealthy beyond all precedent, seem
for the most part to be men with no ulterior dream or aim. They are
not voluptuaries, they are neither artists nor any sort of creators,
and they betray no high political ambitions. Had they anything of the
sort they would not be what they are, they would be more than that and
less. They want and they get, they are inspired by the brute will in
their wealth to have more wealth and more, to a systematic ardor. They
are men of a competing, patient, enterprising, acquisitive enthusiasm.
They have found in America the perfectly favorable environment for
their temperaments. In no other country and in no other age could they
have risen to such eminence. America is still, by virtue of its great
Puritan tradition and in the older sense of the word, an intensely
moral land. Most lusts here are strongly curbed, by public opinion, by
training and tradition. But the lust of acquisition has not been curbed
but glorified....
These financial leaders are accused by the press of every sort of crime
in the development of their great organizations and their fight against
competitors, but I feel impelled myself to acquit them of anything so
heroic as a general scheme of criminality, as a systematic organization
of power. They are men with a good deal of contempt for legislation
and state interference, but that is no distinction, it has unhappily
been part of the training of the average American citizen, and they
have no doubt exceeded the letter if not the spirit of the laws of
business competition. They have played to win and not for style, and
if they personally had not done so somebody else would; they fill a
position which from the nature of things, somebody is bound to fill.
They have, no doubt, carried sharpness to the very edge of dishonesty,
but what else was to be expected from the American conditions? Only
by doing so and taking risks is pre-eminent success in getting to be
attained. They have developed an enormous system of espionage, but on
his smaller scale every retail grocer, every employer of servants does
something in that way. They have secret agents, false names, concealed
bargains,--what else could one expect? People have committed suicide
through their operations--but in a game which is bound to bring the
losers to despair it is childish to charge the winners with murder.
It's the game that is criminal. It is ridiculous, I say, to write of
these men as though they were unparalleled villains, intellectual
overmen, conscienceless conquerors of the world. Mr. J.D. Rockefeller's
mild, thin-lipped, pleasant face gives the lie to all such melodramatic
nonsense.
I must confess to a sneaking liking for this much-reviled man. One
thinks of Miss Tarbell's description of him, displaying his first
boyish account-book, his ledger A, to a sympathetic gathering of the
Baptist young, telling how he earned fifty dollars in the first three
months of his clerking in a Chicago warehouse, and how savingly he
dealt with it. Hear his words:
"You could not get that book from me for all the modern ledgers in New
York, nor for all that they would bring. It almost brings tears to my
eyes when I read over this little book, and it fills me with a sense of
gratitude I cannot express....
"I know some people, ... especially some young men, find it difficult
to keep a little money in their pocket-book. I learned to keep money,
and, as we have a way of saying, it did not burn a hole in my pocket. I
was taught that it was the thing to keep the money and take care of it.
Among the early experiences that were helpful to me that I recollect
with pleasure, was one of working a few days for a neighbor digging
potatoes--an enterprising and thrifty farmer who could dig a great many
potatoes. I was a boy perhaps thirteen or fourteen years of age, and he
kept me busy from morning until night. It was a ten-hour day....
"And as I was saving these little sums, I soon learned I could get as
much interest for fifty dollars loaned at seven per cent.--the legal
rate in the State of New York at that time for a year--as I could earn
by digging potatoes ten days. The impression was gaining ground with me
that it was a good thing to let money be my slave and not make myself a
slave to money. I have tried to remember that in every sense."
This is not the voice of any sort of contemptuous trampler of his
species. This is the voice of an industrious, acquisitive, commonplace,
pious man, as honestly and simply proud of his acquisitiveness as a
stamp-collector might be. At times, in his acquisitions, the strength
of his passion may have driven him to lengths beyond the severe moral
code, but the same has been true of stamp-collectors. He is a man who
has taken up with great natural aptitude an ignoble tradition which
links economy and earning with piety and honor. His teachers were
to blame, that Baptist community that is now so ashamed of its son
that it refuses his gifts. To a large extent he is the creature of
opportunity; he has been flung to the topmost pinnacle of human envy,
partly by accident, partly by that peculiarity of American conditions
that has subordinated, in the name of liberty, all the grave and
ennobling affairs of statecraft to a middle-class freedom of commercial
enterprise. Quarrel with that if you like. It is unfair and ridiculous
to quarrel with him.