“The Seven” made their fatal move on treacherous Updegraff's treacherous
advice, I suspect. But they would not have adopted his suggestion had
it not been so exactly congenial to their own temper of arrogance and
tyranny and contempt for the people who meekly, year after year, presented
themselves for the shearing with fatuous bleats of enthusiasm.
“The Seven,” of course, controlled directly, or indirectly, all but a
few of the newspapers with which I had advertising contracts. They also
controlled the main sources through which the press was supplied with
news--and often and well they had used this control, and surprisingly
cautious had they been not so to abuse it that the editors and the public
would become suspicious. When my war was at its height, when I was
beginning to congratulate myself that the huge magazines of “The Seven”
were empty almost to the point at which they must sue for peace on my own
terms, all in four days forty-three of my sixty-seven newspapers--and they
the most important--notified me that they would no longer carry out their
contracts to publish my daily letter. They gave as their reason, not the
real one, fear of “The Seven,” but fear that I would involve them in
ruinous libel suits. I who had _legal_ proof for every statement I
made; I who was always careful to understate! Next, one press association
after another ceased to send out my letter as news, though they had been
doing so regularly for months. The public had grown tired of the
“sensation,” they said.
I countered with a telegram to one or more newspapers in every city and
large town in the United States:
“'The Seven' are trying to cut the wires between the truth and the public.
If you wish my daily letter, telegraph me direct and I will send it at my
expense.”
The response should have warned “The Seven.” But it did not. Under their
orders the telegraph companies refused to transmit the letter. I got an
injunction. It was obeyed in typical, corrupt corporation fashion--they
sent my matter, but so garbled that it was unintelligible. I appealed to
the courts. In vain.
To me, it was clear as sun in cloudless noonday sky that there could be but
one result of this insolent and despotic denial of my rights and the rights
of the people, this public confession of the truth of my charges. I turned
everything salable or mortgageable into cash, locked the cash up in my
private vaults, and waited for the cataclysm.
Thursday--Friday--Saturday. Apparently all was tranquil; apparently the
people accepted the Wall Street theory that I was an “exploded sensation.”
“The Seven” began to preen themselves; the strain upon them to maintain
prices, if no less than for three months past, was not notably greater; the
crisis would pass, I and my exposures would be forgotten, the routine of
reaping the harvests and leaving only the gleanings for the sowers would
soon be placidly resumed.
Sunday. Roebuck, taken ill as he was passing the basket in the church of
which he was the shining light, died at midnight--a beautiful, peaceful
death, they say, with his daughter reading the Bible aloud, and his lips
moving in prayer. Some hold that, had he lived, the tranquillity would have
continued; but this is the view of those who can not realize that the tide
of affairs is no more controlled by the “great men” than is the river led
down to the sea by its surface flotsam, by which we measure the speed and
direction of its current. Under that terrific tension, which to the shallow
seemed a calm, something had to give way. If the dam had not yielded where
Roebuck stood guard, it must have yielded somewhere else, or might have
gone all in one grand crash.
Monday. You know the story of the artist and his Statue of Grief--how
he molded the features a hundred times, always failing, always getting
an anti-climax, until at last in despair he gave up the impossible and
finished the statue with a veil over the face. I have tried again and again
to assemble words that would give some not too inadequate impression of
that tremendous week in which, with a succession of explosions, each like
the crack of doom, the financial structure that housed eighty millions of
people burst, collapsed, was engulfed. I can not. I must leave it to your
memory or your imagination.
For years the financial leaders, crazed by the excess of power which the
people had in ignorance and over-confidence and slovenly good-nature
permitted them to acquire, had been tearing out the honest foundations on
which alone so vast a structure can hope to rest solid and secure. They
had been substituting rotten beams painted to look like stone and iron.
The crash had to come; the sooner, the better--when a thing is wrong, each
day's delay compounds the cost of righting it. So, with all the horrors of
“Wild Week” in mind, all its physical and mental suffering, all its ruin
and rioting and bloodshed, I still can insist that I am justly proud of my
share in bringing it about. The blame and the shame are wholly upon those
who made “Wild Week” necessary and inevitable.
In catastrophes, the cry is “Each for himself!” But in a cataclysm, the
obvious wise selfishness is generosity, and the cry is, “Stand together,
for, singly, we perish.” This was a cataclysm. No one could save himself,
except the few who, taking my often-urged advice and following my example,
had entered the ark of ready money. Farmer and artisan and professional man
and laborer owed merchant; merchant owed banker; banker owed depositor. No
one could pay because no one could get what was due him or could realize
upon his property. The endless chain of credit that binds together the
whole of modern society had snapped in a thousand places. It must be
repaired, instantly and securely. But how--and by whom?
I issued a clear statement of the situation; I showed in minute detail how
the people standing together under the leadership of the honest men of
property could easily force the big bandits to consent to an honest, just,
rock-founded, iron-built reconstruction. My statement appeared in all the
morning papers throughout the land. Turn back to it; read it. You will say
that I was right. Well--
Toward two o'clock Inspector Crawford came into my private office, escorted
by Joe. I saw in Joe's seamed, green-gray face that some new danger had
arisen. “You've got to get out of this,” said he. “The mob in front of our
place fills the three streets. It's made up of crowds turned away from the
suspended banks.”
I remembered the sullen faces and the hisses as I entered the office that
morning earlier than usual. My windows were closed to keep out the street
noises; but now that my mind was up from the work in which I had been
absorbed, I could hear the sounds of many voices, even through the thick
plate glass.
“We've got two hundred policemen here,” said the inspector. “Five hundred
more are on the way. But--really, Mr. Blacklock, unless we can get you
away, there'll be serious trouble. Those damn newspapers! Every one of them
denounced you this morning, and the people are in a fury against you.”