The Passing of the Idle Rich

by Frederick Townsend Martin

And if our banking system and our great industrial system were born in a day and a night, what may one say of the plutocracy that in this later day has been grafted upon and has grown to be a part of the American social world? Here, indeed, the traditions of the world of history flashed past us, in our forward rush, as dead leaves fly backward from a speeding train. We saw them as they flew—yet we did not clearly see them. We knew they were, but we could not distinguish them one from the other; and, after all, little we cared for them, and little we care now.

Perhaps, as I write, my mind will carry me back to the days before these new phenomena transpired; and I shall be moved to write of social America in the days of its true glory, before the glitter of tinsel and the tawdry finery of mere wealth overlaid it. For that is the background against which stand out in all their hideousness the empty follies of the idle rich and the vapid foolishness of the ultra-fashionable in America to-day.

Forty years ago, as a boy, I lived in a true American home. The atmosphere of that home was still under the vitalizing influence of the nation’s great struggle for emancipation. Lincoln was a saint. The writings of Longfellow and Emerson, Hawthorne and Washington Irving, were constantly read. The traditions of European Society had not struck their roots deep into the social soil of the United States. We were provincial, to be sure, but there was bliss in simplicity and innocence. Morally and intellectually the life of the family and the life of the State were settled. We knew there was a God. We were positive as to just what was right and what was wrong. The Bible, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, the fact of the assured greatness of our country, the power of our religious, political, and social ideals to save the world—our faith in these was our Rock of Ages; and to these must be added the absolute belief in the theory that it was the sacred duty of every human being to serve his kind.

Just in how far these fundamentals are now broken and scattered I shall not here attempt to say. But it is simply true that the Bible is no longer read, that religion has lost its hold, that the Constitution and laws are trampled upon by the rich and powerful, and are no longer held sacred by the poor and weak. Instead of Hawthorne, we read Zola and Gorky; instead of Longfellow and Bryant, Ibsen and Shaw. Among how many perfectly respectable, ay, even religious, people is the name of Nietsche not more familiar than that of Cardinal Newman! I do not know whither we are going, but I do know that we are going.

Come search the records of generations long dead for the seeds of our social system. You will find them planted deep, and long ago. They are the same seeds of class destruction that lay in darkness through the early centuries of Rome’s history, to spring to life in the sunshine of the triumphs of the Republic, and reach their perfect flower in the era of plethoric wealth that marked the apogee of the Empire—and then to fall, as full-blown blossoms will. They are the same seeds that for half a thousand years lay buried in simple England, to come to tardy life in the afterglow of Elizabeth’s triumphs, and reach their fulness in the social glory of the mid-Victorian era.

Less than half a century ago the aristocracy of America worked with its hands, laboured in its broad fields, ate its bread in the sweat of its brow. The cities were small and inconsequential, and the laws of hospitality far overbalanced the traditions of class. Here and there was wealth—but wealth was shackled to the wheels of Opportunity.

Often I have pondered over the startling wisdom of that succinct description of the American ideal written, strange to say, a hundred and forty years ago, by Adam Smith:

In our North American colonies, where uncultivated land is still to be had upon easy terms, no manufactures for distant sale have ever yet been established in any of their towns. When an artificer has acquired a little more stock than is necessary for carrying on his own business and supplying the neighbouring country, he does not, in North America, attempt to establish with it a manufacture for more distant sale, but employs it in the purchase and improvement of uncultivated lands. From artificer, he becomes planter, and neither the large wages nor the easy subsistence which the country affords to artificers, can bribe him rather to work for other people than for himself. He feels that an artificer is the servant of his customers, from whom he derives his subsistence, but that a planter who cultivates his own land, and derives his necessary subsistence from the labour of his own family, is really a master, and independent of all the world.

That was the America of 1760—and it was the America that Lincoln knew. In the region that he knew as a boy and a man, there were neither great plantations, great factories, nor combines. The bulk of the population lived on small farms, toiled with their own hands, and remained in possession of their own products. A few owned and operated small stores or factories for the making of necessities. These could not grow rich. Great riches must be derived from the labour of many. The rich of the Eastern states fifty years ago were the owners of banks, large importing houses, railroads, and factories. These industries, being small, gave rise to fortunes that now seem small. They were riches, but not great riches.

Think, then, of the transition that I myself have seen! Sometimes, as I sit alone in my library reading and thinking about these matters, and reflecting upon the years that make up my brief lifetime, a sort of terror of to-morrow seizes me. I do not need to guess at the facts of my own world. I know the facts that such satirists as Mr. Upton Sinclair vaguely guess, or gather from the gossip of the stables and the kitchen. The miserable excesses of Society are an open book. I cannot blind my eyes or deafen my ears or close my nostrils and forget them. That decay has set in I know; that it has struck deep, as yet I cannot bring myself to believe. And this book is but my feeble effort to prevent it striking deeper, if I may.