Frenzied Finance, Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated

by Thomas William Lawson

Sir: It is time your attention was called to the moral sense of the American people. It is time some one dragged you out of the Wall Street conservatory and set you in the plain white light of daily life. It is time you were shown yourself as you are to-day seen by the millions of your countrymen who, a month ago, believed you to be a great and honorable man.

In spite of the terrible exposures of the past few weeks, in spite of the pitiless revealment of yourself and your directors as tricksters, in spite of the unveiling of the jugglery, grafting, and corruption of your administration of the most sacred trust that can be confided to man, you remain unconvinced of your fall and unpenetrated by your shame. Fortified by the sympathy of your fellow-sinners, you imagine your audacious bluster and your sly evasions before the Investigating Committee of the State of New York represented shrewd generalship and able strategy, forgetting that the enemy against whom your manœuvres were directed was the American people and that, in this inquisition, your character and reputation were as absolutely before the bar as though you had been indicted for sequestration of the funds of some dead friend's wife.

Throughout this broad country of ours are good Americans who have slaved and toiled to gather up the hundreds of dollars which you have exacted from them yearly as the price of the future livelihood of their wives and children, or as the provision for their own old age. You have made yourself the custodian of these funds under sacred pledge of square dealing and safe and honest administration. You have made yourself the national executor, the great depositary of the moneys of the widow and the orphan. You have cried your virtue and honorableness from the housetops, and, under the stress of your pleadings, hundreds of millions of dollars have been confided to you annually—half the savings of the nation have been turned into your coffers, all because you insisted that you were honest beyond all other men, and that the dear ones left behind might rely on your generosity and integrity for their support.

And it is with the moneys that might at any time have been claimed by these widows and orphans that you have been rigging syndicates, debauching legislatures, juggling judges, manipulating stock-markets, and doing other things which will be proven later. Instead of employing the vast power and the immense wealth intrusted to you to conserve the interests of your policy-holders, you have made yourself a part of the cruel robbing machine which the "System" has created to deprive the American people of their savings. Under the pretence of seeking profitable investment, your corporation has been perverted into a vast stock-gambling agency. You have filled the high places in your corporation with your own children and relatives and their relatives, and conferred on them great salaries out of which they have grown rich. You have paid out to friends and associates, on various pleas, millions that rightly belonged to your policy-holders. You have done all these things habitually, yet to-day you describe the investigation being conducted into your operations as an impertinence, and secretly you regard this inquisition and all that pertains to it as a waste of time and energy. You are unrepentant, unashamed, and defiant.

I shall take this opportunity, sir, of reviewing our own relations during the past year and contrasting your position to-day with that you boasted twelve months ago.

One year ago, in Everybody's Magazine, I said:

"The officers, trustees, and officials of the 'Big Three' life-insurance companies have been and are systematically robbing their policy-holders. They are grafters—mean, contemptible grafters."

I gave specific instances of their thieveries.

You replied, not by haling me to court, but by:

Circulating throughout the world documents by the millions, disparaging my reputation by advertisements and "news" and "editorial" statements from your subsidized insurance press, denying my charges and attacking my character, all at the expense of your policy-holders.