GOLDEN WORDS TURN TO BRASS
Unlike government by Progress, government by business, by the
semi-sacred intermediaries between the will to increase and the rest of
us, began to disintegrate before the war; which merely completed the
process.
Let us consider what has happened in the last few years to government by
business, that government which the smoking compartment philosopher has
in mind when he says so hopefully of Mr. Harding: "_They_ will see to it
that he gets along all right."
The first manifestation of nationality in this country was the
nationality of business. Before industry became national nothing was
national. The United States was a pleasant congeries of localities. It
was held together by reading everywhere the story of the Battle of
Bunker Hill in the same school history, which sometimes bore a different
author's name but which was always the same history. "Don't fire till
you can see the whites of their eyes" and "If we don't hang together we
shall all hang separately" were the unifying bond, and they were enough.
We had the same sense of identity as an infant has when it becomes aware
that the delightful toe and the delightful mouth where it is inserted
appertain vaguely to the one ego. The local factory and the local bank
subtended the entire arc of economic consciousness. There was one
single-track railroad which ran from Podunk to Peopack and another from
Peopack to Peoria, unrelated, discontinuous.
In those simple times when business was local the local factory owner,
banker, or railroad builder was the hero of his neighborhood. It was he
who "put the town on the map." He gave it prosperity. He built it by
attracting labor into his employment. He gave it contact with the
outside world. If you owned town lots it was he who gave them value and
it was he who might take away their value if he was offended. If you had
a general store it was he who added to its patronage by adding to the
population. If you raised farm products nearby it was he who improved
your market. He built the fine house which it was your pride to show
visitors. Your success and happiness was bound up in his. He conferred
his blessings for a consideration, for you were careful to make no laws
which restricted the freedom of his operations. You permitted him a vast
unofficial "say" in your local government; you gave him a little the
best of it in the assessment for taxes. You felt a little lifted up by
his condescension in calling you by your first name and stopping to ask
about your family on the street corner. You were jealous of his rights
because after all the value of your own depended upon his use of his.
When business figures arose upon the national horizon they were merely
these local figures vastly multiplied. As a people we called them "Jim"
and "Jay," and "Dan'l," just as we had called the local manufacturer and
banker by their first names. All the good will that went to the local
business leaders went to them. They put money into our pockets, when
they didn't happen to take it out of our pockets; on the whole they were
doing the great work of making this country a richer and better land.
Some who did not conceive the resources of the printing press in the
issuance of new securities had to suffer, but that was their lookout;
suffering for some was the way of the world.
Business began to be national in the tying together into systems the
little dislocated railroads that local enterprise had laid down and in
the creation of a national securities market for the distribution of
ownership in the new combinations.
A new era opened when Gould and Fisk and Drew started at full speed
their rival printing presses in Wall Street. Look over our whole drab
political story from the death of Lincoln to the arrival of Roosevelt,
more than a generation, and, if we did not preserve the names of our
Presidents in our histories, how many names are there worth
remembering? Garfield was shot, which was dramatic. Cleveland was a fat
man who used long Latin words. He was also the first Democratic chief
executive in more than thirty years. What else? Who else?
Meanwhile an amazing array of business personages diverted attention
from the inconspicuous Hayeses, Arthurs, and McKinleys, who were the
flower of our public life. Gould, Fisk, Drew, Hill, Carnegie, the
Rockefellers, Harriman, Morgan, Ryan--business was fertile of men,
politics sterile; you have to go back to the foundation of the
government for a period so prolific in men, of the other sort, or to the
age of Elizabeth or of Pericles for another as prolific in men, of still
another kind. How could the dull sideshow in Washington compete with the
big spectacle in New York?
These demigods of business were not only shining personalities; they
were doing the work of making America great and rich; we all shared in
the prosperity they were creating. To go back to the small town again,
who was it increased the opportunities of the storekeeper, the
neighboring farmer, or real estate holder? Was it the mayor and the
common council by passing ordinances about street signs and sidewalk
encumbrances? Or the manufacturer or railroad builder who put the town
on the map, giving employment to labor or an outlet for its products?
The government at Washington occupied a place in our consciousness
similar to that of the government of the small town. It was charged with
our national defense, a function of such little importance that we had
hardly an army or a navy. It conducted our economic defense, against the
foreigner, with laws written, however, by business itself, which
naturally knew best how it wanted to be defended; you could not, in your
proper senses, suppose that the Hayeses, Arthurs, and McKinleys were
wiser than the Carnegies, Hills, Morgans, or Harrimans. For the rest it
was told severely to let well enough alone. To make assurance doubly
sure that it would do so it was rather openly given over to the great
men who were creating the national wealth.
Starting with the combination of the little speculatively built
railroads into systems and the development of a security market to float
the shares of stock in the new companies, business took on rapidly a
more and more national character. Great bankers arose to finance the
consolidations. An investing public with a wider horizon than that which
used to put its money in local enterprises entrusted its funds in the
hands of the great bankers or took its chances in the market for stocks.
Industry went through a similar concentration. Stronger companies
absorbed their weaker and less successful rivals. The same bankers who
sat in the boards of directors of the railroads representing their
investing public took their places in the directorate of manufacturing
combinations.
The railroads seeking the business of the big industrial companies and
the big industrial companies desiring favors from the railroads placed
representatives in each others' boards. This interlocking created a
national organization of business dominated by a few striking and
spectacular figures.
The popular imagination was as much heated over the discovery of the
United States as a single field of enterprise as the imagination of
Europe had been centuries earlier over the discovery of the new world.
The psychology of the local industry period carried over into this new
period of national industry. The whole country became one vast small
town. The masters of industry, banking, and the railroads were the
leading citizens. They were "putting the United States on the map," as
the local creator of wealth had put the small town on the map. They were
doing something vast, from which we all undoubtedly benefited. Perhaps
we could not trace our advantage so immediately as we could to the
enterprise of the man who brought population to our town, swelling the
price of our real estate or increasing the sales at our stores. But what
had been a matter of experience on a small scale was a matter of belief
on a large scale. The same consequences must follow, with manifold
abundance. And the nation was demonstrably growing rapidly, immensely
richer; surely cause and effect.
Business had from the first taken on among us, as Mr. Lowes Dickinson
remarks, a religious character; and when by a great thrust it
overreached the bounds of locality and became national, its major
prophets emerged. Mr. Van Wyck Brooks quotes Mark Twain as writing: "The
words of a proprietor of a rich coal mine have a golden sound, and his
common sayings are as if they were solid wisdom." How much more of this
sacred character inhered in the heroes who created nationwide railroad
systems, vast steelmaking consolidations, monopolies of oil and coal!
When a New York lawyer said of E. H. Harriman that he moved in spheres
which no one else dare tread, he was putting, a little late, into words
the national awe of the men who had overleapt the bounds of locality and
bestrode the continent industrially, the heads of the vast business
hierarchy. When Mr. Baer said that he operated the Reading Railroad by
divine right he said only what a worshipping people had taught him to
think. Those men did not use this half-religious language by accident;
they crystallized into phrases the feeling of the country toward those
who had done God's work of making it rich, making it successful.
Each like an unconscious Cervantes helped to laugh our industrial
chivalry away.
How easy it is to believe about yourself what everyone believes about
you! How hard not to! How easy to believe that you rule railroads by
"divine right," or walk in "higher spheres," when the whole unexpressed
consciousness of a hundred million people assigns you just such hieratic
appurtenances and privileges. How doubt in the face of all this
evidence? They identified themselves with Progress, and Progress was
what ruled the world. If you have faith and if you are fortified with
the faith of others, self-identification with one of the larger forces
is not difficult. Was not what they were doing Progress, was it not the
realization of that benignant will to the utter blossoming of chaos into
utility which was planned in the beginning? Were they not instruments
rather than mere men, instruments of the greater purpose of which
America was the perfect work? If you believe in theocratic forces you
believe also in chosen human agencies for carrying them out.
They were more than instruments of Progress. I have spoken of government
by economic law as having challenged political government in the
consciousness of the people. As a country we perhaps believe in economic
law more firmly than any nation in the world. Wasn't America being
produced in accordance with economic law and wasn't America one of the
marvels of the earth? I asked a salesman recently, a man with no
personal interests which would give him the prejudices of the business
world, why he hated Henry Ford. "Because," he replied instantly and
without hesitation, "he defies economic law." He spoke like a true
American. To defy economic law and make money at it is like selling the
Savior for twenty pieces of silver.
"The physical laws," says De Gourmont, "promulgated or established by
the scientists, are confessions of ignorance. When they cannot explain a
mechanism they declare its movements are due to a law. Bodies fall by
virtue of the law of gravitation. This has precisely the same value in
the serious order as the comic _virtus dormitiva_." In the promulgation
of economic law our interest perverts the simple and just operation of
our ignorance. In the field of physical phenomena we perceive a series
of uniform events and call that uniformity a law. In the field of
economic phenomena we perceive a series of events uniformly serving our
interests and call that uniformity a law.
These greater business men of the past fruitful generation operated on
the whole over a long period of falling prices. Wealth accumulated. You
read about it in the government reports, dividing the total by the total
population. The division thus effected was mighty assuring. Labor was
better paid. Higher institutions of learning multiplied. Libraries
housed in marble grew upon every crossroads. Intellectual as well as
material needs were in process of being better satisfied. We were
approaching an age when ink upon white paper, now so cheap, cheaper
than ever in the pitiful past, should lift humanity to a new and higher
level.
[Illustration: REPRESENTATIVE FRANK W. MONDELL OF WYOMING]
The evidence was conclusive. These greater business men were in supreme,
in conspicuous direction of the country's development. The happiest
results followed. They worked in harmony with economic law, for they
prospered gloriously and one could no more break economic law and
prosper than one could break criminal law and keep out of jail. Until
Ford came no one could defy economic law with impunity.
And law and justice being two ideas that associate themselves together
in the human mind, in a binder of optimism perhaps, like the disparate
elements that form clinkers in a furnace, they were accomplishing that
perfect work of the justice which inhered in things at the beginning,
when tiny atoms with the urge to produce an earth fit for man to live
on, to produce America in short, began to discover affinities for each
other. No wonder they penetrated "higher spheres" ruled by "divine
right," and that "golden words" dropped from their mouths. Progress,
destiny, an instinct for economic law, it was much to unite one man.
Again, they were more than this. Men cannot be so universally looked to
for the welfare of the nation as they were, without becoming in effect
the government of that nation. Business and the government were one.
Public opinion at that time would have regarded an administration which
defied the great commercial interests as dangerous to the country's
advancement. Lawyers like Mr. Knox or Mr. Root, who had proved their
value to them, went to the Senate as their spokesmen. Able and ambitious
men in both Houses of Congress, wishing power and influence, became
their agents. The chairmen of the important committees of both houses
were in their confidence and spoke with authority because of what they
represented. Some of the virtue of the great, some shadow of divine
right, descended upon them. Among valets the valet of the king is king.
We forget, in the great outcry that was raised a few years ago over the
"invisible government," that the invisible government was once
sufficiently visible, almost consciously recognized, and fully accepted.
It seemed the most natural thing in the world that the men who were
making the country rich, making it a nation economically, should work
their will freely at Washington. We jealously guarded their liberties.
Woe unto the legislator who would interfere with their freedom to
contract, for example, for the labor of children, which we described as
the freedom of children to sell their labor advantageously. Adult labor
banding together to arrange terms of its own sale was felt to be a
public enemy. Every age has its fetish; the medicine man who could
exorcise the evil spirit in stone and bush was not a more privileged
character than his successor at whose touch prosperity sprang out of
the earth, at whose word the mysterious economic forces which might in
their wrath prove so destructive, bowed and became kind.
Make a few individuals the embodiment of a national purpose that has
long existed, unconscious and unquestioned, give them as you inevitably
do in such a case the utmost freedom that is possible on this earth, let
them be limited enough mentally so that they are blind to any other
possible purpose; do all these things and you produce great men. It was
an age of great men, Rockefellers, Carnegies, Morgans, Hills, Ryans,
Harrimans, and a host of others, richer in personalities than any other
period of American life except that which produced Washington, Hamilton,
Franklin, Jefferson, and Marshall. They were the flowering of the whole
pioneer civilization.
One hundred and fifty years of freedom has produced few free men.
Perhaps these were all. They may not have been free intellectually.
Charles Francis Adams writes of their kind: "I have known, and known
tolerably well, a good many successful men,--'big' financially, men
famous during the last half century; and a less interesting crowd I do
not care to encounter. Not one that I have ever known would I care to
meet again, nor is one of them associated in my mind with the idea of
humor, thought, or refinement."
Never mind. They were free in all the essential ways. The men of whom
Adams wrote had no such sense of their limitations as he expressed.
Only an Adams would then have had it, and the Adamses were not what M.
Galtier of _Le Temps_ suggested when, hastily absorbing the American
spirit at Washington, he said to me: "I am reading _The Education of
Henry Adams_: He was what you would call a typical American, was he
not?"
An Adams, even Charles Francis Adams, writing of that time, was
untypical enough, to have missed the point, which was not whether these
men "'big' financially" were interesting, witty, thoughtful, or refined,
but whether they were free. And they were; they were so sure of
themselves, and public opinion was so sure of them, that they
concentrated on the one great aim of that simple day, and did not waste
themselves upon non-essentials like "humor, thought, or refinement."
I have a theory that we are wrong in ascribing the poverty of American
literature and statesmanship to the richness of our business life. "All
our best and ablest minds went into commerce," we say. We flatter
ourselves. Mr. Carnegie, born in the days of Elizabeth, might not have
been Shakespeare. Mr. Harriman was perhaps, after all, no mute Milton,
Mr. Morgan no Michaelangelo.
These brave spirits developed in business not so much perhaps because of
the national urge to "conquer a continent" as because in business,
enjoying the immunity it then did, they found the utmost opportunity for
self-expression, the one great measure of freedom which this free
country afforded. A jealous public guarded their divine right from
impious hands. They believed in themselves. The people believed in them.
So the flowering of the pioneer age came, in such a race of men as are
not on the earth today, and the rule of business reached its climax.
It was an autumn flowering, rich and golden like the Indian summer of
New England culture, a sign that a cycle was run. Adams sniffing from
the transcendental heights of Boston wrote: "a race of mere
money-getters and traders." Remember the sneers in our cocksure press of
those days at the "culture" of Boston? Boston has had its revenge. The
words "mere money-getters" bit in. There were other objects in life
beside pioneering the industrial opportunities of a whole continent just
brought together into commercial unity. Mr. Morgan began to buy art. Mr.
Carnegie began to buy libraries and started authorship himself. The men
"'big' financially" began to look over their shoulders and see the
shadows--as we all do now--where they a little before kept their eyes
straight forward and saw the one clear vision, the truth, such as it
was, that made them free.
I have traced that element in the American political consciousness,
government by business, to its highest moment.
"Divine right" is only safe when it is implicit. When you begin to avow
it, as Mr. Baer did, it is already in question. The national passion
for equality began to work. Had not Mr. Carnegie confessed the weakness
in his soul's fortress by writing a book? Had not Mr. Morgan by buying
art suggested the one aim of pioneering on a grand scale might not be
life's sole end?
Mr. Baer with his avowal, Mr. Carnegie and Mr. Morgan with their seeking
of the broader satisfactions, Mr. Schwab behaving like a king in exile
at the gaming tables of Monte Carlo, may have invited what followed. But
they were only expressing in their own way the sense becoming general
that pioneering was over and that its ideals were too narrow and too
few--even if no clear sense was coming of what state and what ideals
were to take their place. Men turn from leaders whose day of greatest
usefulness is past and set up new leaders against them. Against the
government by business the first great national unity that entered the
American consciousness they began to erect the state, the national
government at Washington.
No one meant to end government by business and substitute for it
government by the people. Not for a moment. We devised a new set of
checks and balances, like that between the various branches provided for
in our Constitution, a new political organism which should equal and
coexist with the one we already had. The government personified by Mr.
Roosevelt was the check and balance to the government personified by
Mr. Harriman and Mr. Morgan. Governments never die but merely recede in
the national consciousness, like the old clothes which we keep in the
attic. Thus revolutions never effect a revolution; democracy is only a
Troy built upon nine other prehistoric Troys: beneath, you find
aristocracy, rule by divine right, despotism, theocracy, and every other
governance on which men in their invincible optimism have pinned their
faith.
The revolution which Mr. Roosevelt brought about was the kind which
exclaims loudly "malefactors of great wealth" while writing to Mr.
Harriman "we are both practical men." It was the kind of revolution this
country desired. The nation wished to eat its cake and have it, to
retain government by business and have alongside it another government,
as powerful, as interesting, as colorful, as rich in personalities, as
the late autumn of pioneering had brought into gorgeous bloom.
Mr. Roosevelt's method with the new government was this: Senator Aldrich
and Speaker Cannon representing the still powerful coexistent government
by business in Congress, would call at the White House and tell the
President just how far he could go and no further. They would emerge. A
moment later the press in response to a summons would arrive. Mr.
Roosevelt would say: "I have just sent for Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Cannon
and forced them to accept my policy, etc." Nobody was deceived. Unlike
the philosopher who made all knowledge his province, Mr. Roosevelt made
all knowledge his playground, and not only all knowledge but all the
arts, including the art of government.
In Mr. Roosevelt's day the two governments, government by business and
political government, existed side by side, of about equal proportions;
and no one really wished either to overtop the other. We were indulging
in revolution with our customary prudence.
The human passion for equality which had risen against the last of those
dominant figures, the last and greatest of the pioneers, and started to
set up representatives of the public as great as they were, was
singularly fortunate in its first manifestations. It "found a man," in
that most amazing jack-of-all-trades, Mr. Roosevelt.
If business had its array of extraordinary personalities, the rival
establishment had its Roosevelt, who surrounded himself with a shining
group of amateurs, Mr. Root, Mr. Knox, General Wood, James Garfield, Mr.
Pinchot, Mr. Knox Smith, the "Tennis Cabinet," to all of whom he
succeeded in imparting some vividness from his own abounding
personality. If pioneers from the days of Daniel Boone on have been
romantic, amateurs are equally romantic. It was romance against romance.
The balance between the two governments did not last long. Government by
business was declining. It was being extruded from the control of
political affairs. Political government was rising. It was reaching out
to control certain phases of business itself. The great pioneers of
national industry were growing old. They were becoming self-conscious,
vaguely aware of changing circumstances, casting about for solider
foundations than "mere money getting," buying art and writing books,
establishing foundations, talking foolishly about their "divine right,"
about the crime of "dying rich."
A race of gamblers came in their train who caricatured their activities.
The great figures who were passing took long chances magnificently,
pioneer fashion, "to strike it rich," to found industries or magnify
avenues of trade. Their imitators, the Gateses, Morses, Heinzes,
and ---- took long chances vulgarly for the excitement there was in them.
Railroads had to be "rescued" from them. Wall Street had to organize its
Vigilantes against them.
I went as a reporter to see ---- once in New York and found him in his
library drinking. He sent for his servant, ordered six bottles of
champagne at once, and after his man had gone opened the whole six, one
after another, on his library rug. He had to exhibit in some way his
large manner of doing things, and this was the best way he could think
of at the moment. He belonged to a fevered race, intoxicated with the
idea of bigness, juggling millions about to no more useful end than
that of pouring champagne on a carpet. They were the _reductio ad
absurdum_ of the pioneer.
The public no longer put its faith blindly as before in those romantic
figures, the great industrial pioneers, those Mississippi River pilots
who knew every rock and reef in the river. Stripped of much power and
prestige, no longer looked to without question for the safety of the
country, that magnificent species, the great pioneer, disappeared. It is
as dead and gone as that equally magnificent species the Mississippi
pilot of Mark Twain's day.
The legitimate succession was the dynasty--it was the dynasty that
destroyed belief in the divine right of kings--of the second generation,
of the younger Stillman, of the younger Rockefeller, competent but
unremarkable, of the younger Morgan, more capable than the rest,
doubtless, but compare his countenance with the eagle mien of his
predecessor.
I used often to discuss with Mr. Roosevelt the members of the dynasty.
He had no illusions. We both knew well a second-generation newspaper
proprietor, a young man of excellent character, as prudent as the
earlier generation had been daring, a petty King who always had an
aspiring Mayor of the palace at his elbow, inclined to go to sleep at
his post from excessive watching of his property. As we would go over
the names in the dynasty, Mr. Roosevelt would say almost invariably: "I
can't describe him better to you than to say he's another ----," naming
our mutual acquaintance, one of the many of his sort into whose hands by
inheritance the control of business has descended.
Whatever the reason is, whether the inertia of large organization and
the weakening of competition have favored the remaining in power of the
second generation, whether we have evolved but one great type, the
pioneer, whose day is past, and have not yet differentiated the true
business man any more than we have differentiated the true statesman;
whether that psychological change which I have sought to trace, that
denial of freedom which once was the pioneers'--the new laws, the hard
restraints operating now upon business as upon everything else and
enforcing conformity--there are today no Titans, no one stealing fire
from the heaven of Progress for the benefit of the human race--unless
Henry Ford--no Carnegies, Morgans, Rockefellers, Harrimans, of the
blessed nineties.
The old sureness is gone. The great pioneers were never assailed by
doubts: they went straight forward, wearing the blinkers of a single
aim, which kept their eyes like those of harnessed horses in the narrow
road; God was with them, Progress was with them, Public Opinion was with
them, the government at Washington was with them.
But their successors, like everyone else, look over their shoulders and
see the shadows: see the government at Washington and attach a comic
importance to that bewildered figure; just as the government at
Washington looks over its shoulder and sees at New York the government
by business, its traditional master, and wishing a master, is unaware
that the twilight of the gods is come. And both see that greatest of all
shadows, Public Opinion, the new monster of Frankenstein which everyone
feeds with propaganda, and fears. These three things were all one in the
bright days of the great pioneers, and in that perfect unity everyone
was sure, so sure, and the few were free, so free!
Business no longer imposes itself up on the imagination through its
extraordinary personalities. In vain do we seek to recover the past. In
vain does the popular magazine fiction strive to furnish what life no
longer does--the pioneer ideal, the hero who overcomes fire and flood
and the machination of enemies and moves irresistibly forward to
success, who believes in himself, whose motto is that the will is not to
be gainsaid, whose life is one long Smile Week.
Vast propaganda exists to hold us true to the old faith; we read it as
we used to read Sunday School fiction; but religion only sought its way
into hearts within the covers of E. P. Roe when other channels began to
close. We beat the bushes for the great, the kings that should come
after Agamemnon. Monthlies of vast circulation tell us of every
jack-of-all-trades who hits upon a million dollars. This one found out
how to sell patches for automobile tires. That one was an office boy who
never knew when it became five o'clock in the afternoon. Our faith
requires vast stirring.
To the gradual weakening of the idea that business was all-wise and
all-powerful, the war greatly contributed. Before 1914 men would say
confidently, "Ah, but business, the bankers, will not let the nations
fight. They have only to pull the strings of the purse and there will be
no money for the fighters." After hostilities began they would say with
equal confidence: "It will be all over in six weeks. The bankers will
not let it go on."
Business was, however, not only powerless to prevent war but it stood by
impotent while the very foundations on which it itself rested were
destroyed. One illusion went.
Then again, during the war unorganized private production failed.
Publicly organized production was immensely successful. Governments the
world over showed that the industrial mechanism could be made to run
faster and turn out more than ever before. The illusion that business
was a mystery understood only by initiates, the men "'big' financially,"
was shaken.
After the war was over the government organization for regulating
production was abandoned. A period of chaos, rising prices, speculation,
wasteful production, of luxuries, ensued and then a crash. One may
explain all that happened in both cases on the basis of the war. But
business needed triumphs to restore its old place in the public
consciousness, and it has had instead a catastrophe.
The weakness of business today is its division. Many financial leaders
saw the depression that would follow peace. Frank A. Vanderlip, for one,
came back from Europe in 1919 full of warnings. He counselled
moderation. He urged deflation instead of further inflation. His advice
was unpopular with those who saw profits from a sudden withdrawal of
wartime restraints. And the consequence of his prudence, according to
what he has told his friends, was his being forced to retire from the
Presidency of the great Wall Street bank of which he had been head.
Henry Ford, moreover, is a destroyer of old illusions. He "defies
economic laws." He does what business says is impossible. In a day of
high prices he produces at an unprecedentedly low price. He does not cut
wages. He finds a market where there is no market. To lower his costs he
needs cheaper steel than he can buy, so he manufactures it himself
cheaper than the great steelmakers can manufacture it. He operates
independently of the "big business" group. Mr. Morgan sends for him and
he declines to go. He grows vastly rich, proving that all the knowledge
the men "'big' financially" have of the mystery of business is no
knowledge at all, only rules made in their own interest.
And business never twice answers the same question in the same way. One
week Mr. Morgan and the international bankers come to Washington and
tell Mr. Harding that American credit must go into foreign trade. The
next week equally "big" bankers from the interior visit the capital and
tell the President that American credit must stay at home developing
American industries. It is the same with the tariff. It is the same with
the taxes. Business is not of one mind about anything.
A politician recently described business on errands of advice to
Washington. "One bunch of fat boys with high hats and morning coats
comes to Washington. The Administration holds out its nose wishing to be
led by it. The fat boys decline the nose. They are not leading anybody.
In deprecatory manner they say: 'Please drive North. We think that is
the way.' They go. The next day another bunch of fat boys in high hats
and morning coats arrives. Again the offer of the nose. Again the
declination. And this time: 'Please drive South. We're sure that is the
way.'"
The government strains its ear to catch the word from Wall Street. But
there never was a time when business had less influence at Washington
than now. It is divided in its own mind, it is ruled by second-rate men.
Of two governments that have occupied a place in the popular
consciousness, government by business and government by parties, I do
not know which is weaker. I do not know which has less unity and
capacity to function, the Republican party or big business.