Crowds / A Moving-Picture of Democracy

by Gerald Stanley Lee

I venture to believe that it is precisely because our common people are seeing that millionaires are not changed Before and After Taking that the majority of time millionaires we have to-day have come to be looked upon as one of the charges—one of the great spiritual charges and burdens modern Society has to carry.

Society has always had to do what it could for the poor, but in our modern civilization, in a new and big sense, we have to see now what there is, if possibly anything, that can be done for the rich.

We have come to have them now almost everywhere about us—these great spiritual orphans, with their pathetic, blind, useless fortunes piled up around them; and Society has to support them, to keep them up morally, keep them doing as little damage as possible, and has to allow day by day besides for the strain and structural weakness they bring upon the girders of the world—the faith of men in men, and the credit of God, which alone can hold a world together.

It is not denied that the average millionaire, when he has made his money, does different-looking things, and gathers different-looking objects about him, and is seen in different-looking places. And it is not denied that he changes in more important particulars than things. He quite often changes people, the people he is seen with but he never or almost never changes himself. He is not one man when he is putting money into his pocket and another when he is taking it out.

We keep hoping at first with each new mere millionaire that when he gets all the money he has wanted it will change him; but we find it almost never does.

Merely reversing the motion with a pocket does not make a man a new and beautiful creature, and one soon sees that the typical millionaire is governed by the same bargain principles, is bullied and domineered over by the same personal limitations, the same old something-for-nothing habits. If he had the habit, while getting money out of people, of getting the better of them, he still insists on getting the better of people when he gives it to them or to their causes. He takes it out of their souls. There never has been a millionaire who runs his business on the old humdrum principle of merely making all the money he can who does not run his very philanthropies afterward on the same general principle of oppressing everybody, of outwitting everybody—and of doing people good in a way that makes them wish they were dead. Philanthropy as a philosophy, and even as an institution, is getting to be nearly futile to-day, for the reason that millionaires—valid, authentic cases of millionaires who are really cured—who are changed either in their motives or their methods with regard to what they do with money, except in rare cases, do not exist.

The New Theatre in New York, which was started as a kind of Polar Expedition to discover and rescue Dramatic Art in America, failed because two hundred and forty millionaires tried to help it. If enough millionaires could have been staved off from that enterprise, or if it could have been taken in hand either by fewer or more select millionaires coöperating with the public and with artists of all classes, New Theatre of New York would not have been obliged, as it has been since, to start all over again on a new basis. The blunders in creative public work that men who get rich in the wrong way are always sure to make had to be made first. They nearly always have to be made first. There is hardly a single enterprise of higher social value in which the world is interested to-day which is not being gravely threatened in efficient service by letting in too many millionaires, and by paying too much attention to what they think. If our people were generally alive to the terrific sameness and monotony of a millionaire's life "before and after," and if millionaires were looked over discriminatingly before being allowed to take part in great public enterprises like the cinema, for instance, the newspapers, the hospitals, the theatres, there is hardly any limit to the new things that public enterprises would begin to make happen in the world, and the new men that would begin to function in them.

Of course, if what a great vision for the people—i.e., a public enterprise is for, is to make money, it would be different. The mere millionaire might understand, and his understanding might help. But if an institution is founded (like a great theatre) to be a superb and noble masterpiece of understanding and changing human nature; if it is founded to be a creative and dominating influence, to build up the ideals and fire the enthusiasm of a city, to lay the foundations of the daily thoughts and the daily motives of a great people, the mere millionaire finds, if he tries to manage it, that he is getting in beyond his depth. A man who has made his money by exploiting and taking advantage of the public can only be expected, in conducting a Theatre, to be an authority on how to exploit a public and take advantage of it still more, and how to make it go to the play that merely looks like the play that it wants.

Millionaires as a class, unless they are men who have made their money in the artist's or the inventor's spirit, really ought to be expected by this time, except in the size of their cheques, to be modest and thoughtful, to stand back a little and watch other people. The millionaires themselves, if they thought about it, would be the first to advise us not to pay too much attention to them. They are used to large things, and they know that the only way to do, in conducting great enterprises, is to select and use men (whether millionaires or not) for the particular efficiencies they have developed. If we are conducting what is called a charity, we will not expect that a millionaire can do good things unless he is a good man. He spoils them by picking out the wrong people. And we will not expect him to do artistic things unless he has lived his life and done his business in the spirit and the temperament of the artist. He will not know which the artists are or what the artists are like inside; and he will not like them and they will not like him, nor will they be interested in him or interested in working with him. Everything that artists or men of creative temperament try to do with the common run of millionaires—all these huge, blind, imponderable megatheriums, stamping along through life, ordering people about—ends in the same way—in irksomeness, bewildered vision, fear, compromise, and failure, as seen from the inside. Seen on the outside or before the public, of course, the Institution will have the same old, bland, familiar air of looking successful and of looking intelligent, and yet of being uninteresting, and of not changing the world by a hair's breadth.

The only millionaires who should be allowed to have a controlling interest in public enterprises are millionaires who do not need to be different before and after making their money. Everybody is coming to see this, sooner or later. It is already getting very hard to raise money for any public enterprise in which mere millionaires or bewildered, unhappy rich men are known to have a controlling interest. The most efficient and far-sighted men do not expect anything very decided or of marked character from such enterprises, and will no longer lend to them either their brains or their money. Mere millionaires will soon have to conduct their public enterprises quite by themselves, and they will then soon fall of their own weight. The moment men are put in control of public enterprises by the size of their brains instead of the size of their cheques, the whole complexion of what are known as our public enterprises will change, and churches, theatres, hospitals, settlements, art galleries, and all other great public causes, instead of boring everybody and teasing everybody, will be attracting everybody and attracting everybody's money. They will be full of character, courage, and vision. Our present great, vague, helpless, plaintive public enterprises—one third art, one third millionaire, one third deficit—drag along financially because they are listless compromises, because they have no souls or vision, and are not interesting—not even interesting to themselves.