The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

But shrewd as these men are, they often fail to see the difference between the sympathetic, unselfish, man-to-man individual help they as poor boys got from people of their own kind in better circumstances, and this general, unequal, pitying, condescending charity which gives indiscriminatingly something that is of value only to the self-respecting, and too often takes away in exchange all, or nearly all, self-respect.

Still, though these “self-made” men give and give largely and with many mistakes, they have the fear of pauper-making ever in mind. And when they give to individuals they try to be doubly careful.

In the second generation—what used to be but is no longer the spendthrift generation—the very rich retrench in the matter of large benefactions. The family position is established. None of the members of it has ever known what it is to be hungry or cold without knowing just where to turn for food and warmth. Sympathy, which was the sentiment in the first generation, now becomes pity. Man-to-man is changed into “Bountiful” and his or her “worthy poor.” And we have the pauper-plant in full blast.

Each day every rich man or woman who is at all well known receives large numbers of begging letters—from beggars in Maine and in Texas, in Florida and in Washington, in all parts of the Union. They want loans. They want notes or mortgages paid. They want pianos and trousseaus. They want pensions for crippled sons or daughters. Or they want anything from old clothes to several thousand dollars to buy a farm or a store. The apparent effrontery of these requests disappears as the letters are read and the amazing, even pathetic, simplicity of the writers stands out.

Curiously enough, some of these requests, preposterous though they are, are granted. A skilfully written letter sent to a certain kind of rich person at just the right moment has been known to produce amazing results. No reader of this book, however, need advise a beggar of his acquaintance to try it. The two cents postage would be far more likely to bring a return if invested in stocks of the mines of the mountains in the moon. There are many of the rich who have every begging letter that is at all reasonable or plausible thoroughly investigated by a secretary—or by some local agent of a corporation in which the recipient happens to be interested. Pity for the “worthy poor” is an extremely potent force in the plutocracy.

But it is local pauper-making that has the greatest fascination for the rich man or woman who does not care to go into charity on the Carnegie or Rockefeller or Armour scale, or to take the trouble to organize a bureau that works with precision and without any advertisement of its owner. The “agony stories” cooked up by the newspapers are noted, the slums are ransacked, the parasites on “charity,” both those who honestly deceive themselves and those who deliberately “graft,” are eagerly welcomed and listened to. Thus there are a good many thousands of rich city dwellers with incomes ranging from twenty thousand to several hundred thousands a year, each of whom has his or her circle of “worthy poor,” or gives regularly to those myriad petty enterprises of misdirected or barefacedly fraudulent charity which enlist the activities of so many “workers.”

The women are the most persistent and unreasonable offenders in this respect. Partly through idleness, partly through a craving to have occupation and a sense of usefulness, partly through a profound pity for their apparently unfortunate sisters, they pour out capital for pauper-plants and search diligently for “worthy poor” to pauperize.

Among the long-very-rich there is notable shyness of the larger kinds of giving. No doubt at bottom this is due to increasing selfishness, increasing absorption in amusements of the wholly selfish kinds. It costs more and more every year to play the rich man’s part; more and more imagination is brought to bear in developing it, both by rich men eager to find new ways of showing off and by ingenious poor men inventing new ways of making a living out of the rich upon whose extravagance they thrive. The rich man, even where his income is huge, is often pinched. He hates to give—he may find that his giving has compelled him to forego a most attractive investment or has compelled him to abstain from some new expensive luxury or pleasure. He hoards, to be ready for such emergencies. Then if he has several children, he wants to leave each of them as rich as possible so that they can all live in the style to which they have been accustomed, the style in which their friends and associates live. For worship of wealth you must look among the long-very-rich. Those who pass Mammon’s statue with a nod or a half-ashamed crook of a reluctant knee will have the pleasure of seeing very, very many of the rich “old families” flat in the dust, noses plowing it, and not a bit ashamed.

Is this drying up of the charity of “philanthropy” wholly a matter for regret?

Several years ago a few young Americans from various parts of the country began to spend their summer vacations at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. They were young; they were poor; they were obscure; they were hard-worked and hard-working as well; they were profoundly indifferent to money or money gain; they were not even bothering especially about fame. They had as their common bond a passion for science. They had as their common aim the satisfying of that divine curiosity which makes the man who has it toil incessantly and unweariedly over ways more arduous and through wildernesses more dangerous than those that baffled the seekers after the Holy Grail. They longed—these earnest, poor, obscure young Americans—to penetrate to Nature’s innermost laboratory, her workshop of workshops, her temple of temples, there to surprise her supreme secret—the mystery of the origin of life.