The Reign of Gilt

by David Graham Phillips

But the young iconoclast is not discouraged. He keeps hammering away—establishing the new order where he has control, making a fierce and incessant and public fight for it in those corporations in which he is a director sitting for a minority interest. And gradually the fury of the “respectable” rises against him. He has outraged the great “respectable” lawyers, who fatten on fraud and crime; he has inflamed the stockholders and bondholders, great and small, who find their incomes cut down; he has exasperated all who, but for the pickings and stealings under the old system, would have to work instead of idling about, pitying and patronizing workers. He has stirred to awful fury the whole capitalistic class, the honest ones no less than the dishonest; for the honest capitalist, while he looks askance at his dishonest fellow-member of the capitalistic solidarity, yet regards him as a wronged brother whenever any one by criticising him seems to be criticising capitalism. And these cyclonic ragings against the young man slowly rouse the masses of the people, slowly waken the slumbering moral sense of a society that has yielded to the seductions of the practical maxim, “Put money in thy purse.” And he is greatly cheered by the swelling, stentorian applause of the people.

He has cut down his income to less than one-twentieth what it was; but still a vast sum, far more than he can possibly spend, pours in upon him and demands investment. Further, many of the enterprises in which he is a large but not a controlling factor are of so suspicious a character, are so dependent for success upon roguery, that he feels he cannot continue in them. To abandon his holdings would be merely to add to the incomes of the rascals; he sensibly, but not without qualms, sells out at as large a price as he can get. Looking for new investments, he goes into the most crowded and squalid section of each of the cities and large towns in which he has interests—into those sections where the workers associated with his various enterprises are congregated. He buys up whole blocks and sections of unsanitary tenements. He tears them down and builds in place of them houses fit for human habitation. And he adjusts the scale of rents there, not on the familiar principle of robbing the poor because it is so easy to do, but on the same principles that he would apply to business property of the kinds used by people whose necessities are not so great that they are helpless before the robber. He is content with a decent profit; he takes no blood-money. He is a business-like, human landlord, not a bloody bandit, not a “clamorer for dividends.”

In each of these neighborhoods he establishes a huge department store in which he sells everything; and he gives value, not sham and shoddy. These stores make a specialty of food. They sell only wholesome food—and they can easily afford to sell it at the same prices which the former purveyors to these poor got for vile, poisonous, rotten meat and vegetables. Then he buys up the street-car lines in his neighborhoods as far as he can, and establishes two-cent fares. He realizes the importance of the item of car-fare to the poor, the wickedness of stock and bond watering to keep up the cruelest of all taxes.

And now he is in hot water! He has alienated a large and influential section of every one of the grand divisions of respectable society. He has against him, and purple with rage at the very mention of his name, all the men and all the women and all the families that directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously, live by exploiting the poor. Right and left he has cut into or cut entirely away incomes, sources of vast profit, those infamous yet “respectable” capitalizations of the industry of picking the pockets in the tattered dress of the working girl, in the ragged overalls of the laborer! What an uproar from all that is articulate! They cry in the newspapers that he is worse than his father, that he is impoverishing the “best citizens,” et cetera. They scream that he is doing it, is using the almost infinite power of his father’s massed millions, with an ulterior motive—solely to increase his income.

As a matter of fact, his income has begun to increase. In a few years, the practice of honesty and justice on a scale that makes it impossible for the dishonest and the unjust to crush him, results in his having a vaster fortune than ever. Everything he touches turns to gold. In his main enterprise, the policy of low prices, honest wares and high wages causes business to flow in and to more than make up for the old profits lost by the abolition of the short-sighted tyrannies and monopolistic, pound-foolish, penny-wise policies. His tenements pay; his department stores can’t take care of the business offered; his street-car lines are crowded. The old business principle, time-honored, was: “Raise prices as the demand increases.” He acts on the new, the scientific business principle: “Lower prices as demand increases. Don’t kill that which you have been striving to create. Foster demand.”

At first he was called a “well-meaning but wildly mistaken philanthropist.” Now he is called a shrewder business man than his father. Like his father, he is hated and envied by all the rich-but-not-so-rich. And, sad yet amusing to relate, he is profoundly suspected by those whom he is striving to benefit. Such few friends as he has left bring this to his attention. “What’s the use?” they say. “Look at the ingrates. If you had stolen ten millions from them and given back a hundred thousand in charity they would have cheered you to the echo. You pamper them, and they turn on you. If there was to be a revolution to-morrow your head would be the first to go off.”

What does the young man reply? He might invite them to note the fact that he is making more money than his father did and is at least escaping the odium of being regarded as a hypocrite. But he does not. He is a peculiar young man. He simply smiles. “I am in business to please one customer first of all,” says he. “That customer is myself. What does it matter to me what other people think of me? I don’t have to live with them. But I do have to live with myself.”

And he orders further reductions of prices, and further increases of wages, buys more street-car lines, builds more tenements, opens a half dozen other big stores. To supply these stores with meat, eggs, butter, vegetables, et cetera, he starts in the neighborhood of each of his cities and towns huge farms, to which he sends boys and girls as apprentices to learn the farming business. And he engages to set up in the farming business each boy or girl who works well. Those who cannot be got in love with farming are to have first call on the lower positions in his various manufacturing and distributing enterprises.

He has now been twenty years at this business of applying old moral principles and policies to the vast modern opportunities for concentration and combination. Twenty years of hard work, and he is a happy, hated man of fifty and odd. He is richer than his father ever dreamed of being. Wonder of wonders, he at last has begun to drive the crooks and the rascals out of big business. There is just one competition in which a crook cannot survive—the competition with intelligent honesty. It is a competition which had never been tried until the coming of our fanciful, fantastic scion of Standard Oil, black sheep in the capitalistic fold. The crooked little farmer or merchant cannot survive against the straight little farmer or merchant. The crooked big “captain of industry” found that he couldn’t survive against our Rockefeller, inheriting his father’s business ability with his father’s wealth, but not inheriting his father’s convention-calloused moral sense.

It is not until our young man is well on toward sixty that there begins to be any real appreciation of philanthropy by making money instead of by giving it away. The laughter at honesty and justice, in business as well as in personal relations, in practice as well as in theory, on week-days as well as on Sunday, toward the helpless and obscure and unknown as well as toward the powerful and “respectable,” gradually dies away before his ocular demonstration of its sound practical wisdom. And his activities have been an enormous educational factor, giving men that practical enlightenment which the school of life alone can give, but which, under the old system, it so rarely did give. His high wages have raised the general wage market. His tenements and dwelling houses have raised the standard of housekeeping. His department stores have raised the standard of food and clothing. And when the material foundations of life rose, the moral and æsthetic structure superimposed upon them of necessity rose also. To raise a house, raise its foundations; don’t try to separate it from them.