The trouble in America, in so far as this type of mind is or was concerned, is or was this: that when it appeared it came rather speedily and roughly into contact with the pen-written notion or ideal embodied in our American Declaration that all men are born free and equal, and that they are possessed of certain inalienable rights, among which of course are those of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And these latter were not supposed to be interfered with by financiers or organizers seeking power. Yet the race has always been, and will so remain, of course, to the swift, the battle to the strong; chemical and physical laws not being easily upset by fiats of government. Time and chance still continue to operate as before, sometimes to destroy the strong, sometimes to destroy the weak. The best that can be said for the theories laid down in the American Declaration is that they do more credit to the hearts of those who penned them than to their heads. Yet that these sentiments so expressed should have moved to bring about a conflict between the American individual and the American mass might well have been foreseen, although curiously it has not yet done so. Other countries without any Declaration are far more alive to their inalienable (so-called) rights than is America, if one may judge by recent developments in Russia and elsewhere. All good things may be and, no doubt, are gifts, but they are not conferred by governments, any more than death and disaster can be prevented by governments. Sometimes innate strength and fortuitous circumstances help some of us, yet this merely illustrates once more the truism that nature “plays favorites” and that many are vastly better equipped than others.
A great voice, for instance, is a gift, and cannot be acquired at any school or for any price; the beauty of a woman, however modest or staggering, is a gift and cannot be purchased or even manufactured (amazing as that may seem in the face of all the drug companies), although ugliness, apparently, can almost be wished on a person, so lavish is life with its disfavors. The ability to paint a great picture, to design a great building, to lead an army, to organize a government, to construct a philosophy, to dream a religion, is a gift and cannot be added to any one by taking thought, however quickly it may be taken away. Neither can the possessors of these be reduced to the level of those who have nothing to offer, no ideas, no dreams. Christ said one really significant thing, “Who by taking thought can add a cubit to his stature?” If He had followed the logic of that statement He would never have delivered the Sermon on the Mount or the Beatitudes and would not now be so popular, but apparently He was genius enough to be illogical.
What has confronted the American organizing genius, now known as a captain of industry, a multi-millionaire, a financier and the like, has been—aside from a mass need for this, that and the other and his desire to supply it in order that he might improve his own condition, strengthen his own individuality, etc.—this same pen-written theory about all men being free and equal. Free they might be to begin with, one might hear him saying to himself—to a very limited extent, anyhow—but equal to himself, however much they might be equal one to another, never. It became his business, therefore, as he soon found and as he afterwards phrased it, to “drive a horse and wagon through the Constitution,” or indeed any other law that might be devised to stop him and his dreams. I do not believe that any financial genius, American or other, anywhere or at any time, ever stopped to consider that there was such a thing as law or a Declaration of Independence or a Constitution when he began; or, if he did, it was as something to be evaded or overcome. To the aggressive organizing mind life is and always has been a free and practically uncharted sea. It finds itself blazing with an impulse to get some one new thing done; it conceives some great scheme, is inspired with some great enthusiasm for something; and thereafter all else is as nothing. Being strong and magnetic and enthusiastic, it rushes in where it is generally assumed angels fear to tread and seizes upon all which it deems may aid it in its dreams. The average man is of as little significance to such a temperament as a stalk of grain to a reaper. Any ideal other than its own is likely to be looked upon as an impediment. But always, of course, there exists the tramping mass of lesser individuals who have been going to school and church and there learning (in America at least) all the religious and copy-book maxims, which argue that the world was made for the individual and that he was born free and equal, each as good as any other and each called upon to aid the other; and these begrudge, and always have and always will, these great giants their power. They often fight them and sometimes beat them.
But they are not to be wholly undone by them at any time, anywhere. Like the Lilliputians, the mass as often succeeds in binding Gulliver with their threads as Gulliver succeeds in tearing through their petty stays. The twain are ever being born side by side in nature; the giant and the pygmy, the shark and the bluefish, the whale and the minnow. “Look,” cry the minnows to their fellows, “this whale imagines he is better, wiser, greater, than we! He moves in larger ways, disturbs our great sea, taking his choice of the realms and pleasures of life. Why should this be? Are we not as good as he? And yet he does all these things which we cannot; he breaks the law which governs the average minnow, whereas we cannot. Therefore he must be evil. We will seize and bind him and so end his privileges, if not him.” Immediately and always, at this point, there arises an intermediate figure or group, the sophisticated “advocates of the people,” “tribunes of the people,” individuals less powerful than the giants, though shrewder than the pygmies, their employers, many of whom are sincere enough in their conviction of unselfishness; others self-seekers and charlatans purely, yet each and every one crying that he will deliver the mass from its bondage, and actually attempting, or pretending, to adjust the impossible demands of the people with the almost impossible individualism of the egoist. But, honest or dishonest as they may be, the mass is never made quite free; the financiers or individuals are never wholly curbed. Both merely proceed to develop new issues and new battlefields.
Personally I believe that most of us would prefer that the mass should not sweep away the individual, for each of us would prefer to be somebody in however small a way rather than mere unrecognizable cogs in a machine or bees in a bee-hive. At best, we are little more than that; even our greatest individuals, individual as they may seem. They, too, are but minute factors in the total machinery, little able to forefend against disaster or the ultimate nothingness that swallows them. But one thing is sure: the individual in the course of the development of his dreams and ambitions does scheme out and construct or bring into organic operation functions which are valuable to mass prosperity, and on that score there is scarcely any fault to be found with him.
The thing that might seriously concern a thinking American would be whether the American financial type, as contrasted with those of other lands and times, is more or less admirable. Greece had Crœsus; Rome, Lepidus, Hadrian; Italy, Lorenzo, the money-gathering Popes; France, Louis XIV, the Baron de Hirsch; England, the first Rothschild, the late Cecil Rhodes, Harmsworth, Strathcona; Japan, Shibusawa.
While it may be admitted that the organizing types developed in America have not had any too great charm or virtue (Astor I., Vanderbilt I., Gould, Sage, Harriman, Morgan), still they appear to compare favorably with most ancients and moderns. If they have done less for the arts, as many seem to think, socially, or at least economically, they have done as much if not more than their predecessors. Astor I. may have begrudged a washerwoman fifty cents, dunned his tenants for rent, debauched the Indians, but he opened up the most remote portions of America and laid the way for roads and railroads. The first Vanderbilt was no doubt a brutal, cruel and savage man, but he had the vision which made a transcontinental railroad possible. His greed and vanity made it possible. As much might be said for Gould, Russell Sage and Harriman, though the picture of Sage keeping apples in his desk to avoid buying lunches for his friends or well-wishers and using his old plug hats for umbrella stands in order to get a little more wear out of them could not be of much interest to the mass except in a Dickensian sense. Unless one accepts the subtleties of Nature as one finds them, sees in all an inexplicable and yet biologic or universally constructive plan, and in these riant and lawless individuals a scheme of hers to achieve something quickly, there is nothing very admirable or even explicable about the dark goings to and fro of such types as the late J. P. Morgan, H. H. Rogers, Thomas F. Ryan, William C. Whitney, or any of a score of other large fortune-builders so recently in control of stupendous matters here and elsewhere. They are not explicable save as motivating forces in the hands or will of higher powers—good, bad or indifferent. Seen at close range they are more suggestive of sharks and we of sniveling bluefish, and it is plainly to our best interests either to keep out of their way or unite firmly to oppose them in whatever way we can, unless we choose to be promptly eaten.
Yet are they any worse than their prototypes anywhere? The worst that can be said for the American is that as yet no one of him has been able to rival Lorenzo the Magnificent or Louis XIV to gather and use in any marked way, supposing there has been anything of importance to use, the significant artistic personalities and materials (American or general) of his time after the fashion, say, of a Lorenzo, a Hadrian or a Can Grande. Perhaps he has had few opportunities, no Michelangelos to countenance or foster, no Raphaels or Leonardos to attach to his court or entourage. Again it may be urged that he has never been in any position to organize or dictate, being by no means in any free or superior position in a democracy such as this. The best he has been able to do apparently is to buy, although of course the power to patronize nobly and generously has to a certain extent been within his range. Still, a stranger to our rich and powerful land might (I do not say he would) be struck by the abject poverty of a Poe or a Whitman, scarcely knowing which way to turn for means, as contrasted with the enormous affluence of so many financial geniuses. Why, one such might ask, should either a writer or poet of the transcendent merit of either of these have lacked a financial sponsor? And why, the same inquiring mind might ask, was there no Mæcenas to befriend the late George Inness, Harris Merton Lyon, or MacDowell, the musician? But in other ways—via libraries, gifts to art museums, schools and universities—he would have to admit that the American multi-millionaire has done quite as well as the others; only, in so far as I can see, he has in the main lacked the insight to connect his gifts with an impulse toward the truest art values and realms of mental freedom and refinement. Too often, as in the case of our universities, his gifts have been far too subtly identified, aside from purely technical progress, with mental retrogression, or at least the perpetuation of religious and moralistic dogma not compatible with the truest mental development. At the same time the retort might be that it has never been a part of the organizing ability of any money genius anywhere to plan for true mental progress. It may not be necessary. Life may be taking care of that “on its own,” as the phrase runs.
However that may be, one cannot help thinking how interesting it would have been if in New York or elsewhere any one of the above-mentioned men had in his day troubled to gather about him in some private court a representative group of intellectual and artistic personalities, for the sole purpose of testifying to his interest in that side of life, if nothing more. After all, the living individual is worth something, and any one of our financiers might have done what no American of wealth, as far as I know, has as yet done: invested some of his boundless wealth in personality. Or he might have endowed a wholly independent magazine or newspaper or theatre, of which there is at present not one, or a school of special learning free from dogmatic interference, or a publishing house, or a university which should have been a true university and not one devoted to the economic or social or religious theories or moods of any particular period. The strangest lack or flaw in the American organizing financial temperament, in so far as I can see, is or has been, hitherto, its inability to see either character or significance in anything save movements which tend to further the most material financial aims: railroads, butcher-companies, electricity, gas, typewriter and other purely mechanical or material organizations. Yet possibly, up to the present time, the land has only needed things of this kind. And perhaps the next generation will make amends. Who knows? Thus far there has been little if any tendency to invest in anything save such art or art forms as have been heralded by time.
To this day, ancient Asiatic, Egyptian and European art forms continue to pour in on us in a brilliant phantasmagoric stream, until we threaten, or did, to drain the world of its treasures. Our private mansions groan with the antiquated skill of Asia and other continents, but of these other matters, or the cultivation or preservation of a single living personality, not a word. It is possible to go forth and raise any reasonable or even unreasonable sum for any number of useless or surplus charitable organizations or hospitals or churches, whereas if it were a question of cash for a truly civilizing movement of some kind, or a personality, the obstacles would prove well nigh insurmountable. Some of the trashiest homes I have ever had the misery of beholding have been those of men of tremendous wealth and alleged refinement, stuffed to overflowing with bogus furniture and art. Yet, when all is said and done, are they to blame? Are they not specialized machines sent here for a purpose? And should one expect more? Verily we have our reward in their practical achievements.... Yet, also, when one looks at them one cannot help remembering that Walt Whitman lived in a back street in Camden and depended upon a friendly admirer to bring him a fish for his supper; that Poe lived in a hut in the woods, unable to achieve or afford a more suitable abode. I am not quarreling; I cite these as interesting facts.