THE long line of American financiers, beginning with Stephen Girard (1750-1831), and extending via Astor, the Vanderbilts, Goulds, J. P. Morgan and F. W. Woolworth to Henry Ford of the present time, suggests nothing so much as a procession of thrifty and, in the main, cat-like animals weaving a devious way amid intricacies of law and public opinion and theories as to morals, duty, charity and the like, until finally one is led to conclude that, by and large, the financial type is the coldest, the most selfish, and the most useful of all living phenomena. Plainly it is a highly specialized machine for the accomplishment of some end which Nature has in view. Often humorless, shark-like, avid, yet among the greatest constructive forces imaginable; absolutely opposed to democracy in practice, yet as useful an implement for its accomplishment as for autocracy; either ignorant or contemptuous of ethical niceties as related to thine and mine, yet a stickler for all that concerns mine; moral and immoral sexually—both types abound; narrow to all but an infinitesimal line in nearly all that relates to the humanities as applied to individuals; wise and generous in the matter of large, even universal benefactions, yet guilty of the meanest subterfuge where their own interests are concerned; and seeking always to perpetuate their own fame. In other words, typical men and women of an avid pagan world (vide Hetty Green, Russell Sage), yet surrounded by religious and ethical abstrusities for which they care little and of which they understand less.
Such might be called the pathology of the genus financier, not only in America, but everywhere.
In regard to our American specimens it is more or less anachronistic to speak of them as purely American in character, although, in a way, they are. The organizing and financial type of mind—American, European or any other—is really little different from that of all preceding countries and ages. Yet financial manipulation, in the extended modern sense, is comparatively new. It dates from the industrial revolution in England in the eighteenth century. There was a time when the organizing type of mind, comparable to our modern examples, was engaged in other things: money-lending and exchange principally. The machinery for finance in the modern sense was lacking. You might have found a J. P. Morgan, a J. D. Rockefeller, or a Russell Sage as Keeper of the Exchequer and Supervisor of the Grain Stores of, say, Egypt or Assyria, or Adviser to the King, whether he ruled in Babylon, Persia or elsewhere. One cannot help thinking what an excellent type of Keeper of the Exchequer, Vizier or High Priest our own John D. Rockefeller would have made. The robes! The sanctity!
As we come forward in history to the end of the Roman Empire and the beginning of that mental darkness known as the Middle Ages, when all intelligence, financial and other, seems to have been completely swept away, we find the purely financial and organizing type but slowly developing. Joseph (he of the coat of many colors), fabled Crœsus, who ruled in Asia Minor, and Lepidus and Mæcenas, friends of triumvirs, emperors and poets, are excellent examples of the ancient financial type. Their like is not to be found until after the revival of banking and trade in the fifteenth century. And if you look back you will see that to-day, in another way, we have been repeating in Wall Street (or were until a few years ago), the type of man who occasionally sat as Emperor over all the Romans. If you are inclined to doubt this you might, if the opportunity offered, examine the collection of portrait busts of Roman Emperors of the highly executive and financial type (Hadrian, Trajanus, Titus, Caracalla and the rest) in the Vatican, the Musee del la Terme and the British Museum. Hadrian, for instance, was as much like the late Commodore Vanderbilt, side whiskers and all, as one man might be to another; and Trajanus greatly resembled the late Mark Hanna, whose name somehow suggests that of a Roman. Any one of ten or fifteen portrait busts of ancient Roman Emperors might almost be mistaken for Armour, Morgan, Gould, Sage, Crocker, Stanford, Hearst. For example, compare Russell Sage to Julius Cæsar; or Wm. H. Vanderbilt to Augustus Cæsar. Indeed, if you were to examine some of the major operations of the successful Roman Emperors you would find that their power to maintain their positions with the Prætorian Guard and the Patrician Class (which was really the Roman world, so far as they were concerned) was largely financial and organizing in the same peculiar spirit in which we find those qualities operating to-day.
It is not until the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Italy, Flanders and north Germany that one encounters financial types very like those with which we have been very recently dealing. Italy of the Renaissance found a most interesting specimen of this type of mind in Cosimo I. of the Medici—“Pater Patriæ,” as he was called—who was little more than a very active Vanderbilt I. of his day. The family first conducted a successful pill business, then Cosimo engaged in the banking business. Being a financier he secured control of nearly all the financial channels of Italy, France, Greece, a portion of Egypt, and the Lowlands. It is charged that he brought about the death of one or two enemies in Florence, not because he disliked them, but because he thought they were dangerous to his interests, and once he came very near to being gibbeted himself. He was a patron of the arts, not so much because he was emotionally and poetically enthusiastic about art as because, as at present, it was a distinguished thing to be. The trick of currying favor via art patronage is old. His descendants, having less of his force and more of the refinement which invariably follows wealth, did more for art and less for trade, and so while we see the Medici family identified with the most brilliant period of Italian art we also see it slowly sinking into financial and political insignificance. That it finally degenerated and passed out is no reflection on the significance of Cosimo, his primary import. Although the coldest and most financial of them all, he was also the best.
This was equally true of Louis XIV of France and Frederick the Great of Germany, organizing and financial types both, although monarchs by birth.
England has had its full share of the type in the officers and directors of its famous East India Company (Warren Hastings, for one) and their efforts to monopolize and exploit the Indian Empire, as well as in the very excellent Rothschild, who flourished at the time of the Battle of Waterloo and who stood behind a tree to view the battle in order that he might decide for himself which side was going to win and so get to London and the stock-market first. There he spread the report that England had lost so that the already trembling stocks of the nation might tumble and he be able to buy them for a song. When he had gathered in all the shares he could carry he gave out the correct news of the victory and reaped his harvest. Dishonest? As you choose to look at such things. But when has high finance been honest, or let us say, considerate of the interests of others? The financial history of this particular individual is so selfishly single-minded as to be almost ridiculous, suggesting a power which invents man for one purpose and no other, as generals, saints and the like are invented.
In America, the history of our financiers is so full of thievery and selfishness as to appear comic were it not for the mass misery which so many of their deeds involved. Stephen Girard, for instance, stole his employers’ ship at the outbreak of the American Revolution (pretending it had been sunk, of course), and with the proceeds opened a wine and cider business in Philadelphia. John Jacob Astor drugged the Indians with fire-water and bought their furs for a song, as well as bribed Government agents to permit him so to do. J. P. Morgan senior at the outbreak of the Civil War sold the Government five hundred of its own condemned rifles for twenty-two dollars each, after having but the moment before bought them from the Government for three dollars and fifty cents each, and that with money borrowed on the strength of the proposed contract. (History of the Great American Fortunes, Myers, Vol. II., page 172.) Cornelius Vanderbilt blackmailed the United States Steamship Company, plying between New York and California, in the amount of nearly $500,000 a year by threatening to operate a rival line. (Ibid. Vol. II., pp. 120-121.) Jay Gould robbed the various States through which his railroad ran and drove some of his rivals to suicide. Russell Sage robbed the city of Troy of a railroad and bribed the Minnesota and other State Legislatures. (Ibid. Vol II., pp. 12-16.) The record is too long to be more than mentioned here; those interested should read Myers’ remarkable work, in which the crimes as well as genius of our long line of money kings are described in full.
That the world has always been troubled with the huge financial innovator and the self-seeker is of course a commonplace; the objection to him has been, as a rule, that he has too few human traits. Like the astronomer, the mathematician, the philosopher and the historian, his thoughts are more or less remote from the concerns of the ordinary individual, although his dealings are with him. To do anything which is to be of benefit to the individual it requires the mind that sees the individual en masse rather than in particular. Indeed, the thing that has always confronted the individual of ability since the beginning, aside from his own inner driving emotions, ambitions and needs, is this same organized need of the mass as represented in constitutions, governments, declarations, which in order to advantage himself he must flatter, satisfy or exploit—but which he must meet in some way or fail. And only when the organized sense of the mass becomes sufficiently intelligent for it to act in concert is it possible to sweep away or even curb the individual. For the individual and the mass are interdependent facts, and the one cannot escape the other, try as each may.
But never, apparently, previous to the French Revolution, which was a revolt against centralized and hereditary constructive craft and ingenuity, had it occurred to the world, or rather the mass, to rout these individuals and make pariahs of them, although the world in recent days has developed an especial aptitude for it, one must admit. England, which is not so much a democracy as an ordered hierarchy of powers, largely financial in character, has never felt called upon to drive these gentlemen from their positions or quarrel with them for the often singular and fantastic manner in which they have achieved their success, or the indifference they may have displayed toward the millions below them. The gentlemen at the top may or may not have intentionally done anything for the peasants at the bottom in the past, but until very recent days they have not been asked to relinquish their control of the machinery. Yet now the world presents another angle to this proposition: the organizer and financier is being suspected and harried everywhere. Only in America, the home of anti-financial legislation, the multi-millionaire is apparently becoming safer than ever and more powerful. Yet to the economist, the historian, the student of politics, it is already a truism that economic reforms are not and never have been permanent; also that no one, however self-interested, ever succeeds wholly in working for himself. He must do something for the mass if he is to do anything for himself. It is a condition of life, not a theory.