HIS DEATH A NOTABLE EVENT.
Vanderbilt's death, as that of one of the real monarchs of the day, was an event of transcendent importance, and was treated so. The vocabulary was ransacked to find adjectives glowing enough to describe his enterprise, foresight, sagacity and integrity. Much elaborated upon was the fiction that he had increased his fortune by honest, legitimate means—a fiction still disseminated by those shallow or mercenary writers whose trade is to spread orthodox belief in existing conditions. The underlying facts of his career and methods were purposely suppressed, and a nauseating sort of panegyric substituted. Who did not know that he had bribed Legislature after Legislature, and had constantly resorted to conspiracy and fraud? Not one of his eulogists was innocent of this knowledge; the record of it was too public and palpable to justify doubts of its truth. The extent of his possessions and the size of his fortune aroused wonderment, but no effort was made to contrast the immense wealth bequeathed by one man with the dire poverty on every hand, nor to connect those two conditions.
At the very time his wealth was being inventoried at $200,000,000, not less than a million wage earners were out of employment, [Footnote: "It is probably true," said Carroll D. Wright in the United States Labor Report for 1886, "that this total (in round numbers 1,000,000) as representing the unemployed at any one time in the United States, is fairly representative.">[ while the millions at work received the scantiest wages. Nearly three millions of people had been completely pauperized, and, in one way or another, had to be supported at public expense. Once in a rare while, some perceptive and unshackled public official might pierce the sophistries of the day and reveal the cause of this widespread poverty, as Ira Steward did in the fourth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor for 1873.
"It is the enormous profits," he pointedly wrote, "made directly upon the labor of the wage classes, and indirectly through the results of their labor, that, first, keeps them poor, and, second, furnishes the capital that is finally loaned back to them again" at high rates of interest. Unquestionably sound and true was this explanation, yet of what avail was it if the causes of their poverty were withheld from the active knowledge of the mass of the wage workers? It was the special business of the newspapers, the magazines, the pulpit and the politicians to ignore, suppress or twist every particle of information that might enlighten or arouse the mass of people; if these agencies were so obtuse or recalcitrant as not to know their expected place and duty at critical times, they were quickly reminded of them by the propertied classes. To any newspaper owner, clergyman or politician showing a tendency to radicalism, the punishment came quickly. The newspaper owner was deprived of advertisements and accommodations, the clergyman was insidiously hounded out of his pulpit by his own church associations, the funds of which came from men of wealth, and the politician was ridiculed and was summarily retired to private life by corrupt means. As for genuinely honest administrative officials (as distinguished from the apparently honest) who exposed prevalent conditions and sought to remedy them in their particular departments, they were eventually got rid of by a similar campaign of calumny and corrupt influences.