NOT GENEROSITY, BUT JUSTICE
It is reasonable, and not unkind, to assume that the time will come
when we shall no longer have John D. Rockefeller with us. He may not
die; as a vindication and a reward he may be honored with the unique
distinction of Enoch and Elijah. But, whether by the vulgar route or
in fiery chariot with angel escort, go he will, and his son will reign
in his stead. The word reign is here used in the metaphoric sense in
which it is almost always used now-a-days. For, the son of Rockefeller
will not be free literally to reign. He will be hedged about with
a thousand and one restraints. His acts will be the result not of
his own intellect and will, but of his training, his tradition, his
environment. He will be little of the autocrat, a great deal of the
agent and servant. But, suppose that he would be really free, really
self-owned, really capable of the mastership of his vast inheritance,
instead of its slave, doing its bidding, acting always as a son of John
D. Rockefeller and a member of the class multi-millionaire. Suppose
this possible. What could he do with his nearly a thousand millions,
for the most part so massed that they control many of the great vital
industries of the country? Imbued with a deep sense of trusteeship to
humanity instead of to the quaint Rockefeller god, and endowed with the
intelligence to act upon that sense, what could he do to make the world
the better for his sojourn in it? What would be his opportunities?
Of course, in the reality his opportunities will be small indeed. His
limitations, through heredity, education and environment, are too
narrow. But under our fanciful, even fantastic, “if,” there must be
surely some way for a rich man to serve his fellow-men and demonstrate
high qualities of mind and heart other than by these commonplace, more
or less “cheap and nasty” schemes of so-called philanthropy. To all men
in the past, and to the small man still--that is, to any man incapable
of grasping the splendid and lofty idealism of Democracy--there
could be nothing more captivating than playing the rôle of my Lord
Bountiful. Not merely the paying of one’s just debts, not merely
the doing of the commands of one’s own self-respect, but graciously
condescending to part with one’s wealth for the gratification of
one’s vanity and for the development of deference and humility in the
recipients of the bounty. Philanthropy as it is practiced is more often
than not a vice both in its origin and in its results. So, we will
not make our imaginary young Rockefeller a philanthropist. We will
not subject him to the temptation to make of himself a supercilious
Pharisee and to make of others paupers and parasites and courtiers.
He is free; he is young; he is fearless. He is absolute master of his
colossal inheritance. He looks up at the vast structure his father
built. He reads upon it the motto his father placed there--“I am a
clamorer for dividends.” His face sobers as he reads, and out of his
mind go his half-formed projects to endow missions and colleges and
hospitals and libraries. “Perhaps I have not so much to give as I
thought,” he says to himself. “I must first see. What are the sources
of my income? Am I stealing from anybody? Should I be giving away that
which is not rightfully mine to give?”
And as a preliminary move he tears down the offensive “I am a clamorer
for dividends,” and puts in its stead “I am a clamorer for justice.”
“Let us first be just,” he says. “Perhaps we shall not be able to be
generous. Perhaps we shall even, hat in hand, and upon our knees, be
compelled to crave the generous forgiveness of our fellow-men.” All
this time he has been standing at the rear or business end of the
paternal structure. He now goes round to the front or philanthropic
side of it. He closes the doors there with a sign, “Philanthropy
suspended during the taking of the inventory.”
And so we find our ideal young Rockefeller, his ears shut against
the importunities of paupers and panderers and parasites, plunging
deep and resolutely into the details of business--of the several vast
enterprises which he, by inheritance, owns or controls. And soon all
his father’s old friends, with the approval of all the leading men in
finance and industry, are discussing whether a commission ought not
to be obtained, and cannot be obtained, to inquire into the sanity of
the young man. Not dividends, but honesty and justice! Why, the young
fellow’s brain is turned! Denouncing business methods approved by the
best lawyers at the bar, sanctified by the use of the greatest captains
of industry? Insisting that commodities should be sold at only a fair
profit over and above the cost of production? Dismissing men skilled in
legal and business chicane? Insisting that no man in his employ shall
have less than a decent living wage? Calling for the reorganization of
great properties, not to increase but to decrease the bonds and stocks
on whose interest and dividends a hundred of our best people are able
to lead lives of elegant leisure and look down with amused pity on
those who have to toil? There is no escape from the conclusion that the
young man is mad, mad as a hatter, mad as a March hare.
If he had established soup kitchens to tempt the hard-working to knock
off and join the army of lusty beggars, if he had given millions to
enable missionaries to live at ease while they gratified their abnormal
passion for meddling in other people’s business, if he had subsidized
faculties to teach only “safe and sane” doctrines, if he had set aside
vast corruption funds for debauching legislatures to suffer the people
to be despoiled, if he had poured rivers of water into the stocks and
bonds of his enterprises, had cut down wages and raised prices, if he
had built himself half a dozen palaces, and conducted himself like a
monkey that has been given a red cap and a pink jacket--why, that would
have been sane, eminently sane. But honesty and justice! And in his own
affairs! A real, practical application! Hear the shouts of derisive
laughter. See the winks, the tongues in derisive cheeks. “The man’s
mad! The man’s mad!” cries a generation tainted with the coarse ideals
of riches, show and condescension.
But let us suppose that he is not strait-jacketed by his friends nor
daunted by the hoots of the crowd. Let us suppose that he remains
at large and has his way. And then, let us look at his first great
“philanthropy.”
At first glance there seems nothing to look at, no important change.
The same old machinery of these several huge Rockefeller industries of
manufacture, trade and transportation seems to be moving on in much the
same old way. The only obvious change is in the fortune and the income
of the young iconoclast and his fellow-stockholders. There is seen an
enormous shrinkage--enough to have endowed hundreds of colleges, enough
to have made millions of paupers. The difference between the old order
and the new is chiefly in moral tone. An honest man and a criminal go
through precisely the same routine each day--dressing, eating, talking,
sleeping. The abysmal difference between the two is invisible to human
eyes.
Nor does the example of the new order seem to amount to much. Such
doings are too expensive. Charity, donations, subscriptions, cost
far less, do not interfere with dividends and interest, and bring
returns in public applause. Why be honest and just when nobody else
is--when nobody appreciates it--when the very victims of the system of
dishonesty and injustice have less respect for you? Why refrain from
“respectable” robbery when indulging in it gives power and prestige?
But the young iconoclast is not discouraged. He keeps hammering
away--establishing the new order where he has control, making a fierce
and incessant and public fight for it in those corporations in which
he is a director sitting for a minority interest. And gradually the
fury of the “respectable” rises against him. He has outraged the great
“respectable” lawyers, who fatten on fraud and crime; he has inflamed
the stockholders and bondholders, great and small, who find their
incomes cut down; he has exasperated all who, but for the pickings
and stealings under the old system, would have to work instead of
idling about, pitying and patronizing workers. He has stirred to awful
fury the whole capitalistic class, the honest ones no less than the
dishonest; for the honest capitalist, while he looks askance at his
dishonest fellow-member of the capitalistic solidarity, yet regards him
as a wronged brother whenever any one by criticising him seems to be
criticising capitalism. And these cyclonic ragings against the young
man slowly rouse the masses of the people, slowly waken the slumbering
moral sense of a society that has yielded to the seductions of the
practical maxim, “Put money in thy purse.” And he is greatly cheered by
the swelling, stentorian applause of the people.
He has cut down his income to less than one-twentieth what it was;
but still a vast sum, far more than he can possibly spend, pours in
upon him and demands investment. Further, many of the enterprises in
which he is a large but not a controlling factor are of so suspicious
a character, are so dependent for success upon roguery, that he feels
he cannot continue in them. To abandon his holdings would be merely
to add to the incomes of the rascals; he sensibly, but not without
qualms, sells out at as large a price as he can get. Looking for new
investments, he goes into the most crowded and squalid section of each
of the cities and large towns in which he has interests--into those
sections where the workers associated with his various enterprises
are congregated. He buys up whole blocks and sections of unsanitary
tenements. He tears them down and builds in place of them houses fit
for human habitation. And he adjusts the scale of rents there, not on
the familiar principle of robbing the poor because it is so easy to do,
but on the same principles that he would apply to business property of
the kinds used by people whose necessities are not so great that they
are helpless before the robber. He is content with a decent profit;
he takes no blood-money. He is a business-like, human landlord, not a
bloody bandit, not a “clamorer for dividends.”
In each of these neighborhoods he establishes a huge department store
in which he sells everything; and he gives value, not sham and shoddy.
These stores make a specialty of food. They sell only wholesome
food--and they can easily afford to sell it at the same prices
which the former purveyors to these poor got for vile, poisonous,
rotten meat and vegetables. Then he buys up the street-car lines in
his neighborhoods as far as he can, and establishes two-cent fares.
He realizes the importance of the item of car-fare to the poor, the
wickedness of stock and bond watering to keep up the cruelest of all
taxes.
And now he is in hot water! He has alienated a large and influential
section of every one of the grand divisions of respectable society. He
has against him, and purple with rage at the very mention of his name,
all the men and all the women and all the families that directly or
indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, live by exploiting the poor.
Right and left he has cut into or cut entirely away incomes, sources of
vast profit, those infamous yet “respectable” capitalizations of the
industry of picking the pockets in the tattered dress of the working
girl, in the ragged overalls of the laborer! What an uproar from all
that is articulate! They cry in the newspapers that he is worse than
his father, that he is impoverishing the “best citizens,” et cetera.
They scream that he is doing it, is using the almost infinite power
of his father’s massed millions, with an ulterior motive--solely to
increase his income.
As a matter of fact, his income has begun to increase. In a few years,
the practice of honesty and justice on a scale that makes it impossible
for the dishonest and the unjust to crush him, results in his having a
vaster fortune than ever. Everything he touches turns to gold. In his
main enterprise, the policy of low prices, honest wares and high wages
causes business to flow in and to more than make up for the old profits
lost by the abolition of the short-sighted tyrannies and monopolistic,
pound-foolish, penny-wise policies. His tenements pay; his department
stores can’t take care of the business offered; his street-car lines
are crowded. The old business principle, time-honored, was: “Raise
prices as the demand increases.” He acts on the new, the scientific
business principle: “Lower prices as demand increases. Don’t kill that
which you have been striving to create. Foster demand.”
At first he was called a “well-meaning but wildly mistaken
philanthropist.” Now he is called a shrewder business man than
his father. Like his father, he is hated and envied by all the
rich-but-not-so-rich. And, sad yet amusing to relate, he is profoundly
suspected by those whom he is striving to benefit. Such few friends as
he has left bring this to his attention. “What’s the use?” they say.
“Look at the ingrates. If you had stolen ten millions from them and
given back a hundred thousand in charity they would have cheered you to
the echo. You pamper them, and they turn on you. If there was to be a
revolution to-morrow your head would be the first to go off.”
What does the young man reply? He might invite them to note the fact
that he is making more money than his father did and is at least
escaping the odium of being regarded as a hypocrite. But he does not.
He is a peculiar young man. He simply smiles. “I am in business to
please one customer first of all,” says he. “That customer is myself.
What does it matter to me what other people think of me? I don’t have
to live with them. But I do have to live with myself.”
And he orders further reductions of prices, and further increases of
wages, buys more street-car lines, builds more tenements, opens a
half dozen other big stores. To supply these stores with meat, eggs,
butter, vegetables, et cetera, he starts in the neighborhood of each
of his cities and towns huge farms, to which he sends boys and girls
as apprentices to learn the farming business. And he engages to set
up in the farming business each boy or girl who works well. Those who
cannot be got in love with farming are to have first call on the lower
positions in his various manufacturing and distributing enterprises.
He has now been twenty years at this business of applying old
moral principles and policies to the vast modern opportunities for
concentration and combination. Twenty years of hard work, and he is
a happy, hated man of fifty and odd. He is richer than his father
ever dreamed of being. Wonder of wonders, he at last has begun to
drive the crooks and the rascals out of big business. There is just
one competition in which a crook cannot survive--the competition
with intelligent honesty. It is a competition which had never been
tried until the coming of our fanciful, fantastic scion of Standard
Oil, black sheep in the capitalistic fold. The crooked little farmer
or merchant cannot survive against the straight little farmer or
merchant. The crooked big “captain of industry” found that he couldn’t
survive against our Rockefeller, inheriting his father’s business
ability with his father’s wealth, but not inheriting his father’s
convention-calloused moral sense.
It is not until our young man is well on toward sixty that there begins
to be any real appreciation of philanthropy by making money instead of
by giving it away. The laughter at honesty and justice, in business as
well as in personal relations, in practice as well as in theory, on
week-days as well as on Sunday, toward the helpless and obscure and
unknown as well as toward the powerful and “respectable,” gradually
dies away before his ocular demonstration of its sound practical
wisdom. And his activities have been an enormous educational factor,
giving men that practical enlightenment which the school of life alone
can give, but which, under the old system, it so rarely did give.
His high wages have raised the general wage market. His tenements
and dwelling houses have raised the standard of housekeeping. His
department stores have raised the standard of food and clothing. And
when the material foundations of life rose, the moral and æsthetic
structure superimposed upon them of necessity rose also. To raise a
house, raise its foundations; don’t try to separate it from them.
As the laughter at iconoclastic business ceased, laughter at
philanthropy burst out. The rich rascals, the smug feeders of their
own vanity, the coy contributors to the conscience fund, who came in
superciliousness and condescension with their pharisaical offerings,
were greeted with hoots and jeers. Our young man of many millions,
dauntless through all those trying years, had taught the people to look
at the true inwardness of things. “Go back to your business,” they
would shout at each of these astonished almsgivers. “Go back, and take
with you this pittance of your filchings from your workmen and your
customers. You are the real object of pity and charity. Look at the
tainted sources of your income! Repent, reform, give us our rights, our
just dues. Don’t pose as a philanthropist when you are giving away our
money--and only a meagre part of the vast sums you have taken from us.
Give justice. Generosity will take care of itself!”
And in those days our young iconoclast came into his own, so everybody
said. But when his friends, wholly changed in their opinion now,
approached him with enthusiastic flattery, he smiled his old peculiar
smile. “I came into my own, years ago,” said he. “I came into it on the
day I tore down the motto ‘I am a clamorer for dividends’ and set up
‘I am a clamorer for justice’, in its place.” And when he died he did
not leave his vast fortune to his children to tempt them to forget his
training and example and become soft, idle, foolish and unhappy. He
left it to his enterprises, its income to be divided between those who
made themselves most valuable and those who, having worked well, had
earned the right to a peaceful old age.
* * * * *
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen,” sang the poet, “the saddest are
these: ‘It might have been.’” Not so. It is the vain might-have-been
that gives birth to the bright shall-be!