Every morning after I began to write "Frenzied Finance" I found a new budget of personalities in my mail, in the newspapers, in pamphlets. Learned lawyers traveled about the country slinging mud at me at banquets and society gatherings; scores of hireling weekly and monthly papers devoted pages to vilifying me; the insurance press was laden with assaults, and for fear the public should miss the brickbats, the insurance companies carefully mailed them to their policy-holders. All these tirades were in one key—that of crude abuse. The statements about myself and my career were nothing but lies. They were not even cleverly imagined.
Upon entering on this crusade against "Frenzied Finance" I expected attack. Reforms are not matured to accompaniments of incense and rose-water, and I had made up my mind to disregard the mud and its slingers. Afterward, if there were any "System" left, I rather looked forward to smothering it beneath the foulness of its own generating. There came a time during the year, however, when I deemed it proper to depart from this resolution and nail some of the lies my enemies were circulating about me. I debated the subject thoroughly, for the rancor of these assaults was evident and I could not help feeling that the general run of my readers would be impatient of the space given these gutter rakers. The determination to go at them was clinched by a letter which came to me, with a number of others from clergymen of various denominations, from a learned Catholic priest, who put the case for a reply most earnestly. He said:
You owe it, my son, to yourself to clear away, for once and all, the charges your enemies have made against you. I have faith you mean all that you say, but there are many, many sons and daughters who are troubled in heart and harassed in mind with doubt whether your motives be pure, and if your deeds in the past have been along the ways of the good. It is my advice, if you will accept it, that you put aside your pride and your dignity and frankly and openly tell us whether these charges that we read are true or false.
BECK VS. LAWSON
I shall deal with the subject as fairly as possible, reminding my readers, however, that I am at a disadvantage in having to use pen and ink instead of the implement appropriate for the purpose, a hose connected with a disinfectant barrel. To begin with, I reproduce the following from the Toledo Blade, December 26, 1904. (I have similar paragraphs clipped from one hundred other papers.)
JAMES M. BECK FLAYS LAWSON
Calls Boston Author-Broker a Frenzied Fakir.
Defines Moneyphobia
Declares He is Victim of New Disease—Compares His Actions to "Crazed Malay Running Amuck."
Philadelphia, December 26th.—Ex-Assistant Attorney-General James M. Beck talked on "Moneyphobia" at the thirty-ninth annual commencement exercises of the Peirce Business College. He paid his respects to Thomas W. Lawson in such terms as "frenzied fakir" and "crazed Malay running amuck." ... "There are abundant indications that this epidemic is now rife in the community. The extraordinary vote polled by a Socialistic candidate for President, in a time of general prosperity, seems to evidence this, as does the avidity with which many intelligent people read in a cheap 'penny dreadful' magazine the incoherent, self-contradictory, and self-incriminating articles of a notorious frenzied fakir, who, like a crazed Malay, is wildly running amuck, and, without rhyme or reason, slashing at the reputations of judges, senators, and financiers."