Light-Fingered Gentry

by David Graham Phillips

This break with Amy was most opportune. He was dining at the Traffords that evening; he could tell Trafford he would accept without any reservations the long-standing invitation to enter the Atwater-Trafford plot to seize the O.A.D.

Trafford was one of the rising stars in finance. He originated in a village in southern New Jersey where he was first a school teacher, then a lawyer. He spent many years in studying the problem of success—success, of course, meaning the getting of a vast fortune. He discovered that there were two ways to enormous wealth—by seizing an accumulation amassed by some one else; by devising a trap that would deceive or compel a multitude of people to contribute each his mite of a few dimes or dollars. The first way was the quicker, of course; but Trafford saw that the number of multi-millionaires incapable of defending at least the bulk of their wealth was extremely limited, and that, of them, few indeed kept their wealth together so that one swoop could scoop it all. His mind turned to the other way. After carefully examining the various forms of trap, he was delighted to discover that the one that was easiest to use was also the best. Insurance! To get several hundred thousand people to make you absolute trustee of their savings, asking no real accounting; and all you had to do was to keep a certain part of the money safely invested so that, when anybody died, you could pay his heirs about what he had paid you, with simple interest, or less, added. Trafford studied the life insurance tables, and he was amazed that nobody had ever taken the trouble to expose the business. He stood astounded before the revelation that the companies must be earning, on "risks" alone, from ten to thirty per cent, this in addition to what clever fellows on the inside must be doing in the way of speculation; that policy holders got back in so-called dividends less than five, usually less than four, often less than three per cent!

Trafford's fingers twitched. Rich? Why, he would be worth millions!

He made choice among the different kinds of insurance. The object was to get a company that would draw in the greatest number of "beneficiaries" and would have to pay the smallest proportion of "benefits." The greatest number were obviously the very poor; and, by happy coincidence, the very poor could also be exploited more easily and more thoroughly and with less outcry than any other class. So, Trafford made burial insurance his "graft." He would play upon the horror the poor have of Potter's Field.

He began in a small way in Trenton; he presently had several thousand policy holders, each paying ten cents a week to his agent-collectors. As soon as a policy of this kind has run for several months, it is to the advantage of both agent and company for it to lapse. Thus, Trafford's policies, obscurely worded, unintelligible to any but a lawyer, read that the weekly payments must be made at the office of the company; that an omission promptly to pay a single month's dues made the policy lapse; that a lapsed policy had no surrender value. He was too greedy at first, and Trenton was too small a place. When it became "too hot to hold him," he went to New York—New York with its vast, ignorant, careless tenement population, with its corrupt government, with its superb opportunities for floating and expanding a respectable grafting scheme.

If he had stayed in Trenton, he would probably have gone to the penitentiary. But in New York he became ever richer, ever more respectable; he attracted about him a group of eminently respectable sustainers of church and society, always eager to get their noses into a large, new trough of swill. The Home and Hearth Mutual Defense Company soon dwelt in a palace, built at a cost of many millions, every penny of it picked from the pockets of ragged trousers and skirts; Trafford himself dwelt in another and even more costly palace farther uptown, built with the same kind of money. He was a vestryman in the fashionable Church of the Holy Family, a subscriber to all the fashionable charities, an authority on the fashionable theories as to the tenement house question and other sociological problems relating to the slums. And he thought as well of himself as did his neighbors. Was it his business if the company's collectors forgot to be accommodating and to relieve the poor of the necessity of making their payments at the offices? Was it his business if policies lapsed by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, through the carelessness or ignorance of the policy holders? Look at the hundreds of thousands whose funeral expenses were provided by the Home and Hearth! Look at the charities he subscribed to; listen to the speeches in behalf of charity and philanthropy he made! Did he not give the policy holders all that was legally theirs?—at least, all that was rightfully theirs under the accepted business code; certainly, more than the law would have allowed them, if laws could be made so that the good could carry on "practical" business and yet the wicked not get undue license. Trafford had never been a moral theorist. He had accepted the code known as legal morals—"the world's working compromise with utopianism," he sonorously called it. As he expanded financially, he expanded morally; by the time he became a high financier, he was ready for the broader code known as financial morals—wherein allowances are made for all those moral difficulties which the legal code, being of necessity of wider application, cannot take into account.

A fine man was Trafford, with a face that the women and the clergy called "sweet" and "spiritual," with a full gray beard, young eyes, bright blue and smiling, iron-gray hair that waved a little, and the dress of the substantial citizen.

His home life was beautiful.

He had made his first and false start with a school teacher—she had had the first grade in the school where he taught the sixth grade. She was of about his own age, and indolent, and had never heard that a married woman ought to keep herself up to the mark; she was, therefore, old at thirty-two, and he still a mere boy in looks and in feeling. She said rather severe things when he so narrowly escaped disgrace during his apprenticeship at Trenton; they quarreled, they separated.

In the boarding house where he first stopped in New York there was a serious, shrewd, pretty girl, the daughter of the landlady and the niece of one of the high dignitaries of the church. Trafford induced his wife to divorce him—before she discovered how swiftly and luxuriantly he was putting forth bough and leaf in congenial New York. He married the niece of the church dignitary in the parlor of the boarding house; a "most elegant function" it was pronounced by the boarders—and, as they read all the "fashionable intelligence" and claimed kinship with various fashionable people, they ought to have known. The wedding was like the bright dawn of a bright day—a somewhat cool, even frosty day, but brilliant. Neither Trafford nor the second Mrs. Trafford had much affection in them. Who knows, perhaps the marriage was the more cloudless for that. Instead of exploiting each other, as loving couples too often do, they exploited their fellow beings, he downtown, she up. As he grew, she grew. As he became rich, she became fashionable; ten years after that wedding, hardy indeed would have been the person who would have dared remind her that she had once lived in a boarding house.