CORRUPTION
I
The Problem of the Nation
So, it seems to me, in this new crude continental commonwealth, there
is going on the same economic process, on a grander scale, indeed, than
has gone so far in our own island. There is a great concentration of
wealth above, and below, deep and growing is the abyss, that sunken
multitude on the margin of subsistence which is a characteristic and
necessary feature of competitive industrialism, that teeming abyss
where children have no chance, where men and women dream neither of
leisure nor of self-respect. And between this efflorescence of wealth
above and spreading degradation below, comes the great mass of the
population, perhaps fifty millions and more of healthy and active men,
women and children (I leave out of count altogether the colored people
and the special trouble of the South until a later chapter) who are
neither irresponsibly free nor hopelessly bound, who are the living
determining substance of America.
Collectively they constitute what Mr. Roosevelt calls the "Nation,"
what an older school of Americans used to write of as the People.
The Nation is neither rich nor poor, neither capitalist nor laborer,
neither Republican nor Democrat; it is a great diversified multitude
including all these things. It is a comprehensive abstraction; it is
the ultimate reality. You may seek for it in America and you cannot
find it, as one seeks in vain for the forest among the trees. It has
no clear voice; the confused and local utterances of a dispersed
innumerable press, of thousands of public speakers, of books and
preachers, evoke fragmentary responses or drop rejected into oblivion.
I have been told by countless people where I shall find the typical
American; one says in Maine, one in the Alleghenies, one "farther
west," one in Kansas, one in Cleveland. He is indeed nowhere and
everywhere. He is an English-speaking person, with extraordinarily
English traits still, in spite of much good German and Scandinavian and
Irish blood he has assimilated. He has a distrust of lucid theories,
and logic, and he talks unwillingly of ideas. He is preoccupied, he
is busy with his individual affairs, but he is--I can feel it in the
air--thinking.
How widely and practically he is thinking that curious product of
the last few years, the ten-cent magazine, will show. In England our
sixpenny magazines seem all written for boys and careless people;
they are nothing but stories and jests and pictures. The weekly
ones achieve an extraordinarily agreeable emptiness. Their American
equivalents are full of the studied and remarkably well-written
discussion of grave public questions. I pick up one magazine and find
a masterly exposition of the public aspect of railway rebates, another
and a trust is analyzed. Then here are some titles of books that
all across this continent are being multitudinously read: Parson's
_Heart of the Railway Problem_, Steffens's _Shame of the Cities_,
Lawson's _Frenzied Finance_, Miss Tarbell's _Story of Standard Oil_,
Abbott's _Industrial Problem_, Spargo's _Bitter Cry of the Children_,
Hunter's _Poverty_, and, pioneer of them all, Lloyd's _Wealth Against
Commonwealth_. These are titles quoted almost at hap-hazard. Within a
remarkably brief space of time the American nation has turned away from
all the heady self-satisfaction of the nineteenth century and commenced
a process of heart searching quite unparalleled in history. Its
egotistical interest in its own past is over and done. While Mr. Upton
Sinclair, the youngest, most distinctive of recent American novelists,
achieved but a secondary success with his admirably conceived romance
of the Civil War, _Manassas, The Jungle_, his book about the beef trust
and the soul of the immigrant, the most unflattering picture of America
that any one has yet dared to draw, has fired the country.
The American nation, which a few years ago seemed invincibly wedded
to an extreme individualism, seemed resolved, as it were, to sit on
the safety valves of the economic process and go on to the ultimate
catastrophe, displays itself now alert and questioning. It has roused
itself to a grave and extensive consideration of the intricate economic
and political problems that close like a net about its future. The
essential question for America, as for Europe, is the rescue of her
land, her public service, and the whole of her great economic process
from the anarchic and irresponsible control of private owners--how
dangerous and horrible that control may become the Railway and Beef
Trust investigations have shown--and the organization of her social
life upon the broad, clean, humane conceptions of modern science. In
every country, however, this huge problem of reconstruction which is
the alternative to a plutocratic decadence, is enormously complicated
by irrelevant and special difficulties. In Great Britain, for example,
the ever-pressing problem of holding the empire, and the fact that one
legislative body is composed almost entirely of private land-owners,
hampers every step towards a better order. Upon every country in Europe
weighs the armor of war. In America the complications are distinctive
and peculiar. She is free, indeed, now to a large extent from the
possibility of any grave military stresses, her one overseas investment
in the Philippines she is evidently resolved to forget and be rid of at
as early a date as possible. But, on the other hand, she is confronted
by a system of legal entanglements of extraordinary difficulty and
perplexity, she has the most powerful tradition of individualism in the
world, and a degraded political system, and she has in the presence
of a vast and increasing proportion of unassimilable aliens in her
substance--negroes, south European peasants, Russian Jews and the
like--an ever-intensifying complication.
II
Graft
Now what is called corruption in America is a thing not confined to
politics; it is a defect of moral method found in every department of
American life. I find in big print in every paper I open, "GRAFT." All
through my journey in America I have been trying to gauge the quality
of this corruption, I have been talking to all kinds of people about
it, I have had long conversations about it with President Eliot of
Harvard, with District-Attorney Jerome, with one leading insurance
president, with a number of the City Club people in Chicago, with
several East-Siders in New York, with men engaged in public work in
every city I have visited, with Senators at Washington, with a Chicago
saloon-keeper and his friend, a shepherd of votes, and with a varied
and casual assortment of Americans upon trains and boats; I read
my Ostrogorsky, my Otünsterberg, and my Roosevelt before I came to
America, and I find myself going through any American newspaper that
comes to hand always with an eye to this. It is to me a most vital
issue in the horoscope I contemplate. All depends upon the answer to
this question: Is the average citizen fundamentally dishonest? Is he
a rascal and humbug in grain? If he is, the future can needs be no
more than a monstrous social disorganization in the face of divine
opportunities. Or is he fundamentally honest, but a little confused
ethically?...
The latter, I think, is the truer alternative, but I will confess
I have ranged through all the scale between a buoyant optimism and
despair. It is extraordinarily difficult to move among the crowded
contrasts of this perplexing country and emerge with any satisfactory
generalization. But there is one word I find all too frequently in the
American papers, and that is "stealing." They come near calling any
profitable, rather unfair bargain with the public a "steal." It's the
common journalistic vice here always to overstate. Every land has its
criminals, no doubt, but the American, I am convinced, is the last
man in the world to steal. Nor does he tell you lies to your face,
except in the way of business. He's not that sort of man. Nor does he
sneak bad money into your confiding hand. Nor ask a higher price than
he means to accept. Nor cheat on exchange. For all the frequency of
"graft" and "stealing" in the press head-lines, I feel the American is
pretty distinctly less "mean" than many Europeans in these respects,
and much more disposed to be ashamed of meanness.
But he certainly has an ethical system of a highly commercial type. If
he isn't dishonest he's commercialized. He lives to get, to come out of
every transaction with more than he gave.
In the highly imaginative theory that underlies the realities of an
individualistic society there is such a thing as honest trading. In
practice I don't believe there is. Exchangeable things are supposed to
have a fixed quality called their value, and honest trading is, I am
told, the exchange of things of equal value. Nobody gains or loses by
honest trading, and therefore nobody can grow rich by it. And nobody
would do business except to subsist by a profit and attempt to grow
rich. The honest merchant in the individualist's dream is a worthy and
urbane person who intervenes between the seller here and the buyer
there, fetches from one to another, stores a surplus of goods, takes
risks, and indemnifies himself by charging the seller and the buyer
a small fee for his waiting and his carrying and his speculative
hawking about. He would be sick and ashamed to undervalue a purchase
or overcharge a customer, and it scarcely requires a competitor to
reduce his fee to a minimum. He draws a line between customers with
whom he deals and competitors with whom he wouldn't dream of dealing.
And though it seems a little incredible, he grows rich and beautiful
in these practices and endows Art, Science, and Literature. Such is
the commercial life in a world of economic angels, magic justice and
the Individualist's Utopia. In reality flesh and blood cannot resist
a bargain, and people trade to get. In reality value is a dream, and
the commercial ideal is to buy from the needy, sell to the urgent
need, and get all that can possibly be got out of every transaction.
To do anything else isn't business--it's some other sort of game. Let
us look squarely into the pretences of trading. The plain fact of the
case is that in trading for profit there is no natural line at which
legitimate bargaining ends and cheating begins. The seller wants to get
above the value and the buyer below it. The seller seeks to appreciate,
the buyer to depreciate; and where is there room for truth in that
contest? In bargaining, overvaluing and undervaluing are not only
permissible but inevitable, attempts to increase the desire to buy and
willingness to sell. Who can invent a rule to determine what expedients
are permissible and what not? You may draw an arbitrary boundary--the
law does here and there, a little discontinuously--but that is all.
For example, consider these questions that follow: Nothing is perfect
in this world; all goods are defective. Are you bound to inform your
customer of every defect? Suppose you are, then are you bound to
examine your goods minutely for defects? Grant that. Then if you
intrust that duty to an employee ought you to dismiss him for selling
defective goods for you? The customer will buy your goods anyhow.
Are you bound to spend more upon cleaning and packing them than he
demands?--to wrap them in gold-foil gratuitously, for example? How are
you going to answer these questions? Let me suppose that your one dream
in life is to grow rich. Suppose you want to grow very rich and found a
noble university, let us say?
You answer them in the Roman spirit, with _caveat emptor_. Then can you
decently join in the outcry against the Chicago butchers?
Then turn again to the group of problems the Standard Oil history
raises. You want the customer to buy your goods and not your
competitor's. Naturally you do everything to get your goods to him,
to make them seem best to him, to reduce the influx of the other
man's stuff. You don't lend your competitor your shop-window anyhow.
If there's a hoarding you don't restrict your advertisements because
otherwise there won't be room for him. And if you happen to have a
paramount interest in the carrying line that bears your goods and
his, why shouldn't you see that your own goods arrive first? And at a
cheaper rate?...
[Illustration: INTERIOR OF A NEW YORK OFFICE BUILDING]
You see one has to admit there is always this element of overreaching,
of outwitting, of fore-stalling, in all systematic trade. It may be
refined, it may be dignified, but it is there. It differs in degree
and not in quality from cheating. A very scrupulous man stops at one
point, a less scrupulous man at another, an eager, ambitious man may
find himself carried by his own impetus very far. Too often the least
scrupulous wins. In all ages, among all races, this taint in trade has
been felt. Modern western Europe, led by England, and America have
denied it stoutly, have glorified the trader, called him a "merchant
prince," wrapped him in the purple of the word "financier," bowed down
before him. The trader remains a trader, a hand that clutches, an
uncreative brain that lays snares. Occasionally, no doubt, he exceeds
his function and is better than his occupations. But it is not he but
the maker who must be the power and ruler of the great and luminous
social order that must surely come, that new order I have persuaded
myself I find in glimmering evasive promises amid the congestions of
New York, the sheds and defilements of Niagara, and the Chicago reek
and grime.... The American, I feel assured, can be a bold and splendid
maker. He is not, like the uncreative Parsee or Jew or Armenian, a
trader by blood and nature. The architecture I have seen, the finely
planned, internally beautiful, and admirably organized office buildings
(to step into them from the street is to step up fifty years in the
scale of civilization), the business organizations, the industrial
skill--I visited a trap and chain factory at Oneida, right in the
heart of New York State, that was like the interior of a well-made
clock--above all, the plans for reconstructing his cities show that.
Those others make nothing. But nevertheless, since he, more than any
man, has subserved the full development of eighteenth and nineteenth
century conceptions, he has acquired some of the very worst habits
of the trader. Too often he is a gambler. Ever and again I have had
glimpses of preoccupied groups of men at green tables in little
rooms, playing that dreary game poker, wherein there is no skill, no
variety except in the sum at hazard, no orderly development, only a
sort of expressionless lying called "bluffing." Indeed, poker isn't
so much a game as a bad habit. Yet the American sits for long hours
at it, dispersing and accumulating dollars, and he carries its great
conception of "bluff" and a certain experience of kinetic physiognomy
back with him to his office....
And Americans talk dollars to an astonishing extent....
Now this is the reality of American corruption, a huge exclusive
preoccupation with dollar-getting. What is called corruption by the
press is really no more than the acute expression in individual cases
of this general fault.
Where everybody is getting it is idle to expect a romantic standard of
honesty between employers and employed. The official who buys rails for
the big railway company that is professedly squeezing every penny it
can out of the public for its shareholders as its highest aim, is not
likely to display any religious self-abnegation of a share for himself
in this great work. The director finds it hard to distinguish between
getting for himself and getting for his company, and the duty to
one-self of a discreet use of opportunity taints the whole staff from
manager to messenger-boy. The politicians who protect the interests of
the same railway in the House of Commons or the Senate, as the case may
be, are not going to do it for love either. Nobody will have any mercy
for their wives or children if they die poor. The policeman who stands
between the property of the company and the irregular enterprise of
robbers feels his vigilance merits a special recognition. A position
of trust is a position of advantage, and deserves a percentage.
Everywhere, as every one knows, in all the modern States, quite as
much as in China, there are commissions, there are tips, there are
extortions and secret profits, there is, in a word, "graft." It's no
American specialty. Things are very much the same in this matter in
Great Britain as in America, but Americans talk more and louder than
we do. And indeed all this is no more than an inevitable development
of the idea of trading in the mind, that every transaction must leave
something behind for the agent. It's not stealing, but nevertheless,
the automatic cash-register becomes more and more of a necessity in
this thickening atmosphere of private enterprise.
III
Political Dishonesty
It seems to me that the political corruption that still plays so large
a part in the American problem is a natural and necessary underside
to a purely middle-class organization of society for business. Nobody
is left over to watch the politician. And the evil is enormously
aggravated by the complexities of the political machinery, by the
methods of the presidential election that practically prescribes a
ticket method of voting, and by the absence of any second ballots.
Moreover, the passion of the simpler minded Americans for aggressive
legislation controlling private morality has made the control of
the police a main source of party revenue, and dragged the saloon
and brothel, essentially retiring though these institutions are,
into politics. The Constitution ties up political reform in the most
extraordinary way, it was planned by devout Republicans equally afraid
of a dictatorship and the people; it does not so much distribute
power as disperse it, the machinery falls readily into the hands of
professional politicians with no end to secure but their immediate
profit, and is almost inaccessible to poor men who cannot make their
incomes in its working. An increasing number of wealthy young men have
followed President Roosevelt into political life--one thinks of such
figures as Senator Colby of New Jersey, but they are but incidental
mitigations of a generally vicious scheme. Before the nation, so busy
with its diversified private affairs, lies the devious and difficult
problem of a great reconstruction of its political methods, as a
preliminary to any broad change of its social organization....
How vicious things are I have had some inkling in a dozen whispered
stories of votes, of ballot-boxes rifled, of votes destroyed, of the
violent personation of cowed and ill-treated men. And in Chicago I saw
a little of the physical aspect of the system.
I made the acquaintance of Alderman Kenna, who is better known, I
found, throughout the States as "Hinky-Dink," saw his two saloons and
something of the Chinese quarter about him. He is a compact, upright
little man, with iron-gray hair, a clear blue eye, and a dry manner. He
wore a bowler hat through all our experiences in common, and kept his
hands in his jacket-pockets. He filled me with a ridiculous idea, for
which I apologize, that had it fallen to the lot of Mr. J.M. Barrie to
miss a university education, and keep a saloon in Chicago and organize
voters, he would have looked own brother to Mr. Kenna. We commenced
in the first saloon, a fine, handsome place, with mirrors and tables
and decorations and a consumption of mitigated mineral waters and
beer in bottles; then I was taken over to see the other saloon, the
one across the way. We went behind the counter, and while I professed
a comparative interest in English and American beer-engines, and the
Alderman exchanged commonplaces with two or three of the shirt-sleeved
barmen, I was able to survey the assembled customers.
It struck me as a pretty tough gathering.
The first thing that met the eye were the schooners of beer. There is
nothing quite like the American beer-schooner in England. It would
appeal strongly to an unstinted appetite for beer, and I should be
curious to try it upon a British agricultural laborer and see how many
he could hold. He would, I am convinced, have to be entirely hollowed
out to hold two. Those I saw impressed me as being about the size of
small fish-globes set upon stems, and each was filled with a very
substantial-looking beer indeed. They stood in a careless row all
along the length of the saloon counter. Below them, in attitudes of
negligent proprietorship, lounged the "crowd" in a haze of smoke and
conversation. For the most part I should think they were Americanized
immigrants. I looked across the counter at them, met their eyes, got
the quality of their faces--and it seemed to me I was a very flimsy and
unsubstantial intellectual thing indeed. It struck me that I would as
soon go to live in a pen in a stock-yard as into American politics.
That was my momentary impression. But that line of base and coarse
faces seen through the reek was only one sample of the great saloon
stratum of the American population in which resides political power.
They have no ideas and they have votes; they are capable, if need be,
of meeting violence by violence, and that is the sort of thing American
methods demand....
Now Alderman Kenna is a straight man, the sort of man one likes and
trusts at sight, and he did not invent his profession. He follows his
own ideas of right and wrong, and compared with my ideas of right
and wrong, they seem tough, compact, decided things. He is very kind
to all his crowd. He helps them when they are in trouble, even if it
is trouble with the police; he helps them find employment when they
are down on their luck; he stands between them and the impacts of an
unsympathetic and altogether too-careless social structure in a sturdy
and almost parental way. I can quite believe what I was told, that in
the lives of many of these rough undesirables he's almost the only
decent influence. He gets wives well treated, and he has an open heart
for children. And he tells them how to vote, a duty of citizenship
they might otherwise neglect, and sees that they do it properly. And
whenever you want to do things in Chicago you must reckon carefully
with him....
There you have a chip, a hand specimen, from the basement structure
upon which American politics rest. That is the remarkable alternative
to private enterprise as things are at present. It is America's only
other way. If public services are to be taken out of the hands of such
associations of financiers as the Standard Oil group they have to be
put into the hands of politicians resting at last upon this sort of
basis. Therein resides the impossibility of socialism in America--as
the case for socialism is put at present. The third course is the far
more complex, difficult and heroic one of creating imaginatively and
bringing into being a new state--a feat no people in the world has yet
achieved, but a feat that any people which aspires to lead the future
is bound, I think, to attempt.