This John J. Valentine was a person of much figure in the country. He was the head of a family two generations removed from the uncouth progenitor who founded its fortune in commerce, real estate and transportation; therefore, he was an aristocrat. For many years he had been president of the Great Midwestern Railroad. After his name in the Directory of Directors was a long list of banks, corporations and insurance companies. He made a great many authoritative speeches, which were read in the economics classes of the universities, printed at length in the newspapers and commented upon editorially. What he said was news because he said it. He represented an immovable point of view, the chief importance of which lay in the mere fact of its existence. He spoke courageously and believingly for the vested rights of property.
However, he might have been all that he was and yet not a national figure in the popular sense. For the essential element of contemporary greatness he was indebted to the fact that his features gave themselves remarkably to caricature. The newspaper cartoonists did the rest. They had fixed him in the public mind’s eye as the symbol of railroad capital.
There was in him or about him an alarming contradiction. The explanation was too obvious to be comprehended all at once. It was this: that his ponderable characteristics were massive, overt and rude, such as one would not associate with a notable gentleness of manner; and yet his manner was gentle to the point of delicacy and he seemed remarkably to possess the gift of natural politeness. Physically he was enormous in all proportions. The head was tall and the forehead overhanging gave the profile a concave form. He had a roaring, windy voice, made husky by long restraint; it issued powerfully from a cave partly concealed by a dense fibrous mustache.
“Oh, here they are,” he said, producing my reports.
Turning them sheet by sheet he questioned me at length, desiring me to be most explicit in my recollections as to the reactions of people to Coxeyism. His knowledge of the country through which we had passed was surprising. When we were at the end I said:
“I have talked with all sorts of people besides,—people in Washington, on my way to New York, and here also. Nobody seems to know what is wrong. Some say it’s the tariff. Others say it’s something that has been done to money. Nearly everyone blames Wall Street more or less. What is the matter? Why is labor unemployed?”
He passed his hand over his face, then leaned forward in his chair and spoke slowly:
“Why are the seven-year locusts? Why do men have seasons of madness? Who knows?”
After a pause, his thoughts absorbing him, he continued in a tone of soliloquy.
The country was bewitched. The conglomerate American mind was foolishly persuaded to a variety of wistful and unverified economic notions,—that was to say, heresies, about such important matters as money, capital, prices, debts. People were minding things they knew nothing about and could never settle, and were neglecting meanwhile to be industrious. This had happened before in the world. In the Middle Ages Europe might have advanced, with consequences in this day not easily to be imagined, but for the time and the energy of mind and body which were utterly wasted in quest of holy grails and dialectical forms of truth. So now in this magnificent New World, the resources of which were unlimited, human progress had been arrested by silly Utopians who distracted the mind with thoughts of unattainable things.