Windy McPherson's Son

by Sherwood Anderson

And in the meantime Sam, with Webster, a banker named Crofts who had profited largely in the firearms merger, and sometimes Morrison or Prince, began a series of stock raids, speculations, and manipulations that attracted country-wide attention, and became known to the newspaper reading world as the McPherson Chicago crowd. They were in oil, railroads, coal, western land, mining, timber, and street railways. One summer Sam, with Prince, built, ran to a profit, and sold to advantage a huge amusement park. Through his head day after day marched columns of figures, ideas, schemes, more and more spectacular opportunities for gain. Some of the enterprises in which he engaged, while because of their size they seemed more dignified, were of reality of a type with the game smuggling of his South Water Street days, and in all of his operations it was his old instinct for bargains and for the finding of buyers together with Webster’s ability for carrying through questionable deals that made him and his followers almost constantly successful in the face of opposition from the more conservative business and financial men of the city.

Again Sam led a new life, owning running horses at the tracks, memberships in many clubs, a country house in Wisconsin, and shooting preserves in Texas. He drank steadily, played poker for big stakes, kept in the public prints, and day after day led his crew upon the high seas of finance. He did not dare think and in his heart he was sick of it. Sick to the soul, so that when thought came to him he got out of his bed to seek roistering companions or, getting pen and paper, sat for hours figuring out new and more daring schemes for money making. The great forward movement in modern industry of which he had dreamed of being a part had for him turned out to be a huge meaningless gamble with loaded dice against a credulous public. With his followers he went on day after day doing deeds without thought. Industries were organised and launched, men employed and thrown out of employment, towns wrecked by the destruction of an industry and other towns made by the building of other industries. At a whim of his a thousand men began building a city on an Indiana sand hill, and at a wave of his hand another thousand men of an Indiana town sold their homes, with the chicken houses in the back-yards and vines trained by the kitchen doors, and rushed to buy sections of the hill plotted off for them. He did not stop to discuss with his followers the meaning of the things he did. He told them of the profits to be made and then, having done the thing, he went with them to drink in bar rooms and to spend the evening or afternoon singing songs, visiting his stable of runners or, more often, sitting silently about the card table playing for high stakes. Making millions through the manipulation of the public during the day, he sometimes sat half the night struggling with his companions for the possession of thousands.

Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam’s companions who had not followed him in his spectacular money making, stayed in the office of the firearms company and ran it like the scientific able man of business he was. While Sam remained chairman of the board of the company and had an office, a desk, and the name of leadership there, he let Lewis run the place, and spent his own time upon the stock exchange or in some corner with Webster and Crofts planning some new money making raid.

“You have the better of it, Lewis,” he said one day in a reflective mood; “you thought I had cut the ground from under you when I got Tom Edwards, but I only set you more firmly in a larger place.”

He made a movement with his hand toward the large general offices with the rows of busy clerks and the substantial look of work being done.

“I might have had the work you are doing. I planned and schemed with that end in view,” he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.

“And the money hunger got you,” laughed Lewis, looking after him, “the hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it.”

One might have come upon the McPherson Chicago crowd about the old Chicago stock exchange on any day during those years, Crofts, tall, abrupt, and dogmatic; Morrison, slender, dandified, and gracious; Webster, well-dressed, suave, gentlemanly, and Sam, silent, restless, and often morose and ugly. Sometimes it seemed to Sam that they were all unreal, himself and the men with him. He watched his companions cunningly. They were constantly posing before the passing crowd of brokers and small speculators. Webster, coming up to him on the floor of the exchange, would tell him of a snowstorm raging outside with the air of a man parting with a long-cherished secret. His companions went from one to the other vowing eternal friendships, and then, keeping spies upon each other, they hurried to Sam with tales of secret betrayals. Into any deal proposed by him they went eagerly, although sometimes fearfully, and almost always they won. And with Sam they made millions through the manipulation of the firearms company, and the Chicago and Northern Lake Railroad which he controlled.

In later years Sam looked back upon it all as a kind of nightmare. It seemed to him that never during that period had he lived or thought sanely. The great financial leaders that he saw were not, he thought, great men. Some of them, like Webster, were masters of craft, or, like Morrison, of words, but for the most part they were but shrewd, greedy vultures feeding upon the public or upon each other.

In the meantime Sam was rapidly degenerating. His paunch became distended, and his hands trembled in the morning. Being a man of strong appetites, and having a determination to avoid women, he almost constantly overdrank and overate, and in the leisure hours that came to him he hurried eagerly from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding sane quiet talk, avoiding himself.