VANDERBILT AND HIS CRITICS.
They denounced Vanderbilt as a bandit whose methods were a menace to the community. To the onlooker this campaign of virulent assault was extremely suggestive. If there was any one line of business in which fraud was not rampant, the many official reports and court proceedings of the time do not show it.
This widespread fraud was not occasional; it was persistent. In one of the earlier chapters, the prevalence, more than a century ago, of the practise of fraudulent substitution of drugs and foods was adverted to. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was far more extensive. In submitting, on June 2, 1848, a mass of expert evidence on the adulteration of drugs, to the House of Representatives, the House Select Committee on the Importation of Drugs pointed out:
For a long series of years this base traffic has been constantly increasing, until it has become frightfully enormous. It would be presumed, from the immense quantities, and the great variety of inferior drugs that pass our custom houses, and particularly the custom-house at New York, in the course of a single year, that this country had become the great mart and receptacle of all of the refuse merchandise of that description, not only from the European warehouses, but from the whole Eastern market. [Footnote: Reports of Committees, First Session, Thirtieth Congress, 1847-48, Vol. iii, Report No. 664:3—The committee reported that opium was adulterated with licorice paste and bitter vegetable extract; calomel, with chalk and sulphate of barytes; quinine, with silicine, chalk and sulphate of barytes; castor, with dried blood, gum and ammonia; gum assafoetida with inferior gums, chalk and clay, etc., etc. (pp. 10 and 11).]
In presenting a formidable array of expert testimony, and in giving a list of cases of persons having died from eating foods and drugs adulterated with poisonous substances, the House Committee on Epidemic Diseases, of the Forty-Sixth Congress, reported on February 4 1881:
That they have investigated, as far as they could … the injurious and poisonous compounds used in the preparation of food substances, and in the manufacture of wearing apparel and other articles, and find from the evidence submitted to them that the adulteration of articles used in the every day diet of vast numbers of people has grown, and is now practised, to such an extent as to seriously endanger the public health, and to call loudly for some sort of legislative correction. Drugs, liquors, articles of clothing, wall paper and many other things are subjected to the same dangerous process. [Footnote: House Reports, Third Session, Forty-sixth Congress, 1880-81, Vol. i, Report No. 199: 1. The committee drafted a bill for the prevention of these frauds; the capitalists concerned smothered it.]
The House Committee on Commerce, reporting the next year, on March 4, stated that "the evidence regarding the adulterations of food indicates that they are largely of the nature of frauds upon the consumer … and injure both the health and morals of the people." The committee declared that the practise of fraudulent substitutions "had become universal." [Footnote: House Reports, First Session, Forty-seventh Congress, 1881-82, Vol. ii, Report No. 634: 1-5.]
These few significant extracts, from a mass of official reports, show that the commercial frauds were continuous, and began long before Commodore Vanderbilt's time, and have prevailed up to the present.
Everywhere was fraud; even the little storekeepers, with their smug pretensions to homely honesty, were profiting by some of the vilest, basest forms of fraud, such as robbing the poor by the light-weight and short-weight trick, [Footnote: These forms of cheating exist at present to a greater extent than ever before. It is estimated that manufacturers and shopkeepers cheat the people of the United States out of $200,000,000 a year by the light-weight and short-weight frauds. In 1907 the New York State Sealer of Weights and Measures asserted that, in that State alone, $20,000,000 was robbed from the consumers annually by these methods. Recent investigations by the Bureau of Standards of the United States Department of Commerce and Labor have shown that immense numbers of "crooked" scales are in use. It has been conclusively established by the investigations of Federal, State and municipal inspectors of weights and measures that there is hardly an article put up in bottled or canned form that is not short of the weight for which it is sold, nor is there scarcely a retail dealer who does not swindle his customers by the light-weight fraud. There are manufacturers who make a specific business of turning out fraudulent scales, and who freely advertise the cheating merits of these scales.] or (far worse) by selling skim milk, or poisonous drugs or adulterated food or shoddy material. These practises were so prevalent, that the exceptions were rarities indeed.
If any administration had dared seriously to stop these forms of theft the trading classes would have resisted and struck back in political action. Yet these were the men—these traders—who vociferously come forth with their homiletic trades against Vanderbilt's criminal transactions, demanding that the power of him and his kind be curbed.
It was not at all singular that they put their protests on moral grounds. In a form of society where each man is compelled to fight every other man in a wild, demoralizing struggle for self- preservation, self-interest naturally usurps the supreme functions, and this self-interest becomes transposed, by a comprehensible process, into moralities. That which is profitable is perverted into a moral code; the laws passed, the customs introduced and persisted in, and the weight of the dominant classes all conspire to put the stamp of morality on practices arising from the lowest and most sordid aims. Thus did the trading class make a moral profession of its methods of exploitation; it congratulated and sanctified itself on its purity of life and its saving stability.
From this class—a class interpenetrated in every direction with commercial frauds—was largely empanelled the men who sat on those grand juries and petit juries solemnly passing verdict on the poor wretches of criminals whom environment or poverty had driven into crime. They were the arbiters of justice, but it was a justice that was never allowed to act against themselves. Examine all the penal codes of the period; note the laws proscribing long sentences in prison for thefts of property; the larceny of even a suit of clothes was severely punishable, and begging for alms was a misdemeanor. Then contrast these asperities of law with the entire absence of adequate protection for the buyer of merchandise. Following the old dictum of Roman jurisprudence, "Let the buyer beware," the factory owner could at will oppress his workers, and compel them, for the scantiest wages, to make for his profit goods unfit for consumption. These articles the retailer sold without scruple over his counter; when the buyer was cheated or overcharged, as happened with great frequency, he had practically no redress in law. If the merchant were robbed of even ever so little he could retaliate by sending the guilty one to prison. But the merchant himself could invidiously and continuously rob the customer without fear of any law. All of this was converted into a code of moralities; and any bold spirit who exposed its cant and sham was denounced as an agitator and as an enemy of law and order. [Footnote: A few progressive jurists in the International Prison Congress are attempting to secure the recognition in law of the principle that society, as a supreme necessity, is obligated to protect its members from being made the victims of the cunning and unscrupulous. They have received no encouragement, and will receive none, from a trading class profiting from the very methods which it is sought to place under the inhibition of criminal law.]
Vanderbilt did better than expose it; he improved upon, and enlarged, it and made it a thing of magnitude; he and others of his quality discarded petty larceny and ascended into a sphere of superlative grand larceny. They knew with a cynical perception that society, with all its pompous pretensions to morality, had evolved a rule which worked with almost mathematical certainty. This rule was the paradoxical, but nevertheless true, one that the greater the theft the less corresponding danger there was of punishment.