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.