It is truth—of the kind that carries its own bell and candle. Within the narrative itself are the reagents required to test and prove its genuineness. Were man endowed with the propensity of a Münchhausen, the cunning of a Machiavelli, the imagination of Scheherezade, the ability of a Shakespeare, and the hellishness of his Satanic Majesty, he could not play upon 400,000 words, or one-quarter that number, and make the play peal truth for a single hour to the audience who will read this book, or to one-thousandth part the audience that has already read it in Everybody's Magazine.
Such as the story is, it is before you. If in its perusal you fathom my intentions, my hopes, my desires, I shall have been repaid for the pain its writing has brought me. At least you will find the history of a colossal business affair involving millions of dollars and manned by the financial leaders of the moment. It is a fair representation of financial methods and commercial morals as they exist in America at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a contemporary document the narrative should have value; as history it is not, I believe, without interest. As a message it has had its influence. Indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that no man in his own generation has seen such a crop come forth from seed of his own sowing since the long bygone days when the wandering king planted dragons' teeth on the Phœnician plain and raised up an army of warriors.
FOREWORD
There will be set down in this book, in as simple and direct a fashion as I can write it, the story of Amalgamated Copper and of the "System" of which it is the most flagrant example. This "System" is a process or a device for the incubation of wealth from the people's savings in the banks, trust, and insurance companies, and the public funds. Through its workings during the last twenty years there has grown up in this country a set of colossal corporations in which unmeasured success and continued immunity from punishment have bred an insolent disregard of law, of common morality, and of public and private right, together with a grim determination to hold on to, at all hazards, the great possessions they have gulped or captured. It is the same "System" which has taken from the millions of our people billions of dollars, and given them over to a score or two of men with power to use and enjoy them as absolutely as though these billions had been earned dollar by dollar by the labor of their bodies and minds. Yet in telling the story of Amalgamated, the most brazen and voracious maw of this "System," I desire it understood that I take no issue with men; it is with a principle I am concerned. With the men I have had close and intimate intercourse, and from my knowledge of the means they have used, and the manner in which they have used them, and the causes and effects of their performances, I have no hesitation in stating that the good they have done, the evils they have created, and the indelible imprints they have made on mankind are the products of a condition and not of their individualities, and that if not one of them had ever been born the same good and evil would to-day exist. Others would have done what they did, and would have to answer for what has been done, as they must. So I say the men are merely individuals; the "System" is the thing at fault, and it is the "System" that must be rectified. Better far for me not to tell the story I am going to tell; better far for the victims of Amalgamated not to know who plundered them and how, than to have them know it only to wreak vengeance on individuals and overlook the "System," which, if allowed to continue, surely will in time, a short time, destroy the nation by precipitating fratricidal war.
The enormous losses, millions upon millions—to my personal knowledge over a hundred millions of dollars—which were made because of Amalgamated; the large number of suicides—to my personal knowledge over thirty—which were directly caused by Amalgamated; the large number of previously reputable citizens who were made prison convicts—to my personal knowledge over twenty—directly because of Amalgamated, were caused by acts of this "System" of which Henry H. Rogers and his immediate associates were the direct administrators; and yet Mr. Rogers and his immediate associates, while these great wrongs were occurring, led social lives which, measured by the most rigid yardstick of mental or moral rectitude, were as near perfect as it is possible for human lives to be. As husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, friends, they were ideal, cleanly of body and of mind, with heads filled with sentiment and hearts filled with sympathies; their personal lives were like their homes and their gardens—revealing only the brightest things of this world, the singing, humming, sweet-smelling things which so strongly speak to us of the other world we are yet to know. As workers in the world's vineyards, they labored six days and rested upon the Sabbath, and gave thanks to Him from whom all blessings flow that He allowed them, His humble creatures, to have their earthly being. And yet these men, to whose eyes I have seen come the tears for others' sufferings, and whose voices I have heard grow husky in recounting the woes of their less fortunate brothers—these men under the spell of the brutal code of modern dollar-making are converted into beasts of prey, and put to shame the denizens of the deep which devour their kind that they may live.
In the harness of the "System" these men knew no Sabbath, no Him; they had no time to offer thanks, no care for earthly or celestial being; from their eyes no human power could squeeze a tear, no suffering wring a pang from their hearts. They were immune to every feeling known to God or man. They knew only dollars. Their relatives of a moment since, their friends of yesterday and long, long ago, they regarded only as lumps of matter with which to feed the whirring, grinding, gnashing mill which poured forth into their bins—dollars.
In telling the story of Amalgamated I hope to have profited by my long and intimate study of this cruel, tigerishly cruel "System," so as to be able to deaden myself to all those human sympathies which I have heard its votaries so many times subordinate to "It's business." I shall try only to keep before me how the Indians of the forest, as our forefathers drove them farther and farther into the unknown West, got bitter consolation out of the oft-chanted precept of their white brethren of civilization, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," reminding myself that whatever of misery or unhappiness my story may bring to the few, it will be as nothing to that which they have brought to the many.