A clever woman magazine writer once asked Bernard M. Baruch for
some information about the peace treaty. The question was not in
his special field, the economic sections of the treaty, and he told
her so.
"It took him one sentence to say that he could not tell me what I
wanted to know," she described the interview afterward. "And then
he talked to me for two hours about himself. He told me of his
start in life as a three-dollar-a-week clerk, how rich he was, his
philosophy of life; how you should recognize defeat when it was
coming, accept it before it was complete and overwhelming and start
out afresh, how liberal and advanced were his social views, how
with all his wealth he was ready to accept a capital tax as perhaps
the best way out of the bog in which the war had left the world,
how democratic he was in his relations with his employees and his
servants. It all seemed as amazing to him as if he were describing
someone else, or as if it had just happened the day before."
Perhaps it is only to women and to journalists that men talk so
frankly about themselves, to the most romantic and best trained
listening sex and profession, who perforce survey the heights from
below. But this young woman's experience was, I have reason to
believe, a common one.
Is it vanity? You say that a man who talks so much about himself
must be vain. To conclude that he is vain is not to understand Mr.
Baruch. Is a child vain when it brings some little childish
accomplishment, some infantile drawing on paper, and delightedly
and frankly marvels at what he has done? It is given to children
and to the naive openly to wonder at themselves without vanity,
with a deep underlying sense of humility, and in Mr. Baruch's case
the unaffected delight in himself proceeds from real humility.
After twenty-five years in the jungle of Wall Street, there
is--contradictions multiply in his case--much of the child about Mr.
Baruch, simple, trustful--outside of Wall Street,--incapable of
concealment,--outside of Wall Street--of that which art has taught
the rest of us to conceal. His humility makes him wonder; his
naivete makes him talk quite frankly, unrestrained by the
conventions that balk others. After all, is not wondering at
yourself a sign of humility? A vain man, become great by luck, by
force of circumstances, by the possession of gifts which he does
not himself fully understand, would still take himself for granted.
He would not be a romance to himself, but a solid, unassailable
fact.
For Baruch the great romance is Baruch, the astonishing plaything
of fate, who started life as a three-dollar-a-week broker's clerk;
made millions, lost millions, made millions again, lost millions
again; finally, still young, quit Wall Street with a fortune that
left the game of the market dull and commonplace, seeking a new
occupation for his energies; became during the war next to the
President, the most powerful man in Washington; emerged from the
war, which wrecked most reputations, with a large measure of
credit, prepared by the amazing past for an equally amazing future.
A career like that makes it impossible for the man who knows it
best not to expect anything. Why not the "Disraeli of America?"--a
phrase he once, rather confidentially, employed concerning his
anticipated future.
Did you ever see a portrait bust smiling, not softly with the eyes
or with a slight relaxation of the mouth, but firmly, definitely,
lastingly smiling, with some inward source of satisfaction? Look at
Jo Davidson's bust of Baruch, among the famous men at the Peace
Conference.
I once saw the various sketches in clay that went to the making of
that portrait--the subject was proving elusive to the sculptor.
There were two obvious traits to be represented; the unusual knot
in the brow between the eyes and the smile, without which it was
evident that you had not Baruch. The extraordinary concentration in
the forehead was easy enough to transfer to clay; but the smile
kept defying the artist. When a smile was traced in the clay it
softened the face out of character, destroyed that intensity which
the central massing of the brow denoted; and when the smile was
deleted the face lost all its brilliance, became merely intense,
concentrated, racial, acquisitive perhaps, clearly not Mr. Baruch's
face. Ultimately the sculptor succeeded in wedding a smile to that
brow, and the bust went on exhibition with those of Wilson, Foch,
House, Clemenceau, and the others; but the union was never more
than a compromise, a marriage of convenience for the artist.
That smile is as inevitable a part of Baruch as his engaging
naivete in talking about himself. It is always there, brilliant,
unrelated to circumstances. It does not spring from a sense of
humor,--Mr. Baruch, like the rest of the successful, has not a
marked sense of humor; a sense of the irony of fate he has,
perhaps, but not more. It does not denote gaiety, nor sympathy, nor
satire; it is not kind nor yet unkind; it does not relax the
features, which remain tense as ever even when smiling; it suggests
satisfaction, self-confidence, and a secret inner source of
contentment. It is with Mr. Baruch when he is tired, or ought to be
tired; the romance of Baruch is an internal spring of refreshment.
It does not leave him when he is angry, if he is ever angry; the
romance of Baruch diverts him. Though always there, it is not a
fixed smile, a mask, something worn for the undoing of Wall Street;
it is a real smile. Somewhere subconsciously there abides the
picture of the poor clerk become amazingly rich, of power in
Washington, of a beckoning future with possibilities as
extraordinary as the wonders of the past. Life is not logical,
dull, commonplace, a tissue of cause and effect; it proceeds
delightfully by daily miracles. The American Disraeli is no further
away to-day than was the Baruch of to-day from the Baruch of
yesterday. Enough to account for a smile in marble, bronze, or in
whatever metal the human face is made of.
Take the miracle of the War Administration. It was not vanity but
humility, the kind of humility that would have saved Wilson, that
served Mr. Baruch there. He came to Washington out of Wall Street
and Wall Street is always anathema. More than that he came out of
that part of Wall Street which is beyond the pale; he did not
belong to the right monied set there; which is to be anathema with
that part of the community to which Wall Street itself is not
anathema; moreover he had been unjustly accused in connection with
the famous Wall Street "leak." And he entered an administration
which was the center of much prejudice and hatred. Yet he was
modest enough, however, to assume that his personality did not
count, that it was the work to be done which mattered, and that he
could depend upon the friendliness both of the Republicans and of
the great industrial interests of the country to that work if it
should be properly done.
The belief Mr. Wilson has and a much lesser man, Hiram Johnson,
has, that men are thinking exclusively about them personally and
not about the causes they advocate or the measures they propose is
a more dangerous form of vanity than the habit of admiring oneself
audibly. It requires colossal egotism to imagine the existence of
many enemies and Mr. Baruch is genuinely humble in the matter of
enmity. After watching him during the war, in an administration
which was enemy mad, I fancy he counts his genuine foes on the
fingers of one hand. Moreover he was quite impersonal about his
task. He did not do everything himself on the theory that no one
else was quite big enough to do it. There is no practical snobbism
about him. His knowledge of the industries of the country was that
of the speculator; it was not that of the practical industrialist,
and he knew it.
He surrounded himself with the best men he could find. He trusted
them implicitly, his habit being not to distrust men until he finds
that they can be trusted but to trust them unless he finds that
they cannot be trusted--also a modest and naive trait. He was never
tired of praising Legg, Replogle, Summers, and the other business
men whom he brought to Washington, praising himself, of course, for
his skill in choosing them--he never achieves self-forgetfulness--but
giving them full credit for the work of the War Industries Board.
And he inspired an extraordinary loyalty among his associates, big
and little. He treated the Republicans as he treated big business
as if all had only one interest, above politics and personalities,
and that was to win the war. And when President Wilson, in response
to Republican criticism of the war organization, gave him real power
to mobilize American industry, the Republicans applauded the bestowal
of authority as constructive and took credit to themselves for
accomplishing it.
Baruch and Hoover, alone of the business men who came to Washington
during the war achieved real successes in the higher positions, and
he showed vastly the greater capacity of the two to operate in a
political atmosphere. A man who was nothing but a Wall Street
speculator, not an industrial organizer, organized successfully the
biggest industrial combination the world has ever seen; a man who
was suspect of American business got on admirably with American
business, and a man who had not been in politics accomplished the
impossible task of adjusting himself to work under political
conditions. It is another chapter in the romance of Baruch.
He cannot explain it, so why should not he wonder about it quite
openly and quite delightedly, with all his engaging naivete? That
inability to explain anything is one of the characteristics of Mr.
Baruch. When you begin to apprehend it you begin to see why he is a
romance to himself. He cannot explain himself to himself, nor to
anyone else, no matter how much he tries. And even more, he cannot
explain his opinions, his conclusions, his decisions to anyone in
the world with all the words at his command. He can never give
reasons. Mentally nature has left him, after a manner, incommunicado.
His mind does not proceed as other men's minds do.
The author of the "Mirrors of Downing Street" describes Lord
Northcliffe's mind as "discontinuous." If I had never talked to
Lord Northcliffe I should be led to suppose that his mind resembled
Mr. Baruch's. But the British journalist's mental operations are a
model of order and continuity compared to those of the former
American War Industries Chairman. Like the heroes of the ancient
poems Mr. Baruch's mind has the faculty of invisibility. You see it
here; a moment later you see it there, and for the life of you
cannot tell how it got from here to there, a gift of incalculability
which must have been of great service in Wall Street, but which does
not promote understanding nor communication. And the more Mr. Baruch
tries to give you the connecting links between here and there the
worse off you are, both of you.
The ordinary mind is logical and is confined within the three
dimensions of the syllogism. You watch it readily enough shut in
its little cage whose walls are the major premise, the minor
premise, and the conclusion. There is no escape as we say, from the
conclusion. There is no escape anywhere.
But Mr. Baruch's mind escapes easily. It possesses the secret of
some fourth mental dimension, known only to the naive and the
illogical, or perhaps supralogical. He has brilliant intuitions,
hunches, premonitions, the acute perceptions of some two or three
extra senses that have been bred or schooled out of other men.
Perhaps he is like Lloyd George, who is not logical but achieves
his successes through two or three senses which ordinary men have
not; however, unlike Lloyd George, he cannot simulate logic and,
after jumping to his conclusions, reduce them to the understanding
of the three-dimensional mind. It is a grief to him that he cannot;
for if he could make a speech, that is to say, translate himself,
that figure of Disraeli would, he thinks, be less remote. But when
your mental operations are a succession of miracles, you may have
brilliant intuitions and extraordinary prevision about the mineral
supplies necessary to win the war,--which he had--you may have
wonder, like the naive and the poets, about that extraordinary
thing yourself, or about that still more extraordinary thing which
is life or destiny, but you cannot move the masses.
Still there are compensations. A perfectly logical mind would have
explained all the wonder away, reduced the miracle of personality
to a stolid operation of cause and effect, quite self-approbatively
no doubt, and made Mr. Baruch talk of himself as the rest of the
great do, modestly, after this fashion: "Behold me! I am what I am
because when I was nine years old I saved nine cents and resolved
then and there always to save as many cents each year as I was
years old. Young man, SAVE!"
There is no fun in being not a wonder but a copy book. And a
perfectly logical mind would flirt with Disraeli warily. It would
say, "One does not at fifty change from business to politics with
success. Disraeli didn't start out in Wall Street. As the Germans
say, 'what will become vinegar sours early.'"
Mr. Baruch slips easily through the three sides of this reasoning.
Life is not logical. Fate is not logical. He is not logical.
He has had his taste of public life under Wilson and he wants more.
I venture to say that he would give every one of his many millions
and be as poor, well, poorer than any member of the present
cabinet, to be in the place Mr. Hughes occupies to-day.
Everyone who knows him has heard him say that when he entered
office he resolved to quit business because he learned so much as
head of the War Industries Board that it would be improper for him
ever to go into the market again. There is more to it than that;
public life has given him a profound distaste for mere money-making.
He wrote to Senator Kenyon the other day that he had not
made a dollar since he went to work for the government. I believe
that to be true for I have found him an extraordinarily truthful
and honest man. He has that desire for public distinction which is
so often characteristic of his race. He has the idealism, a
characteristic also of the race which gave to the world two great
religions. He has the same passion for public service now that he
once had for the market. And he belongs to a race, which, in spite
of all our national catholicity on the subject of races, has never
yet produced its Disraeli in America, and to a party out of power,
perhaps for a long time, and he spent his youth learning a trade
which is not the trade he would follow now.
All of this accounts for his restlessness. He is still youthful and
has enormous energies and no occupation for them. He loves personal
publicity and has an instinct for it, not so keen as Hoover's or
Will H. Hays', but still keen.
Whither shall he turn? To the organization of his party? There he
may buy the right to be lampooned and in the end, if his party
succeeds, to be introduced into the Cabinet apologetically, as Hays
and Daugherty were, on the plea that the President must appoint a
number of party workers. To the Senate? It is a body which affords
escape from the boredom of small town life for men who have grown
rich on the frontier or in the dull Middle West. It carries with it
an excuse to live in Washington, some social position there, and a
title envied in Marion, Reno, Butte, or Salt Lake City. Senators
who start young serve long and obediently, suppressing all their
natural instincts for self-expression, and attain if they are
lucky the scant distinction of a committee chairmanship in a
legislature that has steadily tended toward submergence. To the
House? Individuals are lost in the House. And the Presidency comes
to few, and by chance.
Knowing his ambition for public distinction and his wealth, men go
to him every day to sell him the road to power and influence, and,
if you will, public service. Let him have the Democratic
organization on condition of paying its debts and financing its
activities. One faction of the Democratic party recently sought
control, spreading the understanding that Mr. Baruch would, in the
event of its success, open wide his pocket book. After the meeting
of the National Committee at which this faction met its defeat I
said to a prominent member of the victorious group: "Now that you
have won you will probably get Baruch's money. He is restless,
eager to find an outlet for his energies, less interested in any
personality than in his party. Hang on and wait and he must come to
you."
"Do you know," he replied, lowering his voice confidentially, "That
is just the way I diagnose it."
And at this very time the Republicans, hearing much of Mr. Baruch's
money and its use to build up such an intensive organization for
the Democrats, as Chairman Hays with a million or two at his
disposal had erected for them, considered seriously whether or not
it would not be wise themselves to occupy Mr. Baruch's energies and
divert his ambitions away from party organization. They debated
putting Mr. Baruch on the commission to reorganize the executive
departments of the government. All had their eyes on the same
ambition and the same wealth!
Several daily newspapers in New York, and I know not how many
magazines and weeklies, have been offered at one time or another to
Mr. Baruch, for it is known that one of his ideas of public service
is to own and edit a great liberal journal, a "Manchester Guardian"
of America. But an opportunity to buy a newspaper in New York is an
opportunity to invest $3,000,000 or $4,000,000, to lose $500,000 or
more for several years thereafter and to become the national figure
that Mr. Ochs is, or Mr. Reid is, or Mr. Munsey is, certainly
something far short of the American Disraeli or even the Baruch of
the War Industries Board.
Mr. Baruch, you will observe, has no vulgar illusions about what
money will buy. He likes money. It brings with it a certain
personal enlargement. It adds to the romance of himself in his own
eyes, as well as in the eyes of others. It procures the flattering
ears of journalists, and a place on front pages, and, if one
inclines toward ostentation, even the ownership of a newspaper
itself.
But money will not buy a commanding place in public life. And even
if it would buy such a place he would not be content to do other
than earn one. He wants to repeat the thrills of his youth in the
market, in the thrills of a second youth in Washington. He is
incurably romantic.
To sum him all up in a sentence--he has an extraordinary sense of
wonder and an unequalled sense of reality, the sense of wonder
directed toward himself, the sense of reality directed largely but
not exclusively elsewhere.