Or take the beef trust. Armour and Company started with $160,000, and all the rest has come out of profits. In a single year they distributed stock dividends of $80,000,000! Or take that Aluminum Company of America, the family pet of the Mellons, that gets so many kinds of favors from our government; they once declared a stock dividend of 500%, and yet they can only pay their workers $3.36 per day! Or take the bread trust, Wall Street’s newest peace baby; the General Baking Company has increased the value of its investment 67,500% in nine years! And out of what? Well, if you are an insider, and can go to the right banks and get a sufficient “line” of credit, you can build huge electric ovens, which will bake bread so fast and so cheaply as to wipe the little hand bakers off the map; they will come to you as wage-slaves, and you will have a monopoly of fresh bread in a great city, and out of your profits you can pay lawyers and aldermen and editors and labor-sluggers, and be safe against every form of attack.
There is no use piling up examples, Judd. Suffice it to say, that every big business in America is owned and run under that system; and you pay for it. During the war you got your dollar an hour wages, and you thought it was next door to heaven; but you see, for every dollar you made, these Wall Street fellows were making tens of millions; and when it came to the spending of the money, each one of their tens of millions was just as powerful, just as legal and as sweet-smelling, as your pitiful one!
LETTER VII
My dear Judd:
When I was a youth, trying to find out about my country, one of the first things I learned was that its politics were corrupt. I lived in New York City, and saw that corruption all about me, and the hideous ruin of human lives; naturally I tried to figure out why these things had to be. The explanation given me in school was that it was the ignorant foreigners who crowded into our cities; they didn’t understand our institutions, they sold their votes, and delivered our political parties into the hands of bosses.
It happened that I had a certain relative—I won’t tell his name, suffice it that he was a financial man, on his way to becoming one of our great millionaires. He wanted to break into New York, so he opened an office, and gave a big block of stock to Richard Croker, at that time boss of Tammany Hall; he made another Tammany chieftain the head of his New York office—and that was all there was to it, he was “in,” and his firm took over the city’s business along that line, and all city officials and employes were given to understand that they must patronize it. Later on my relative—he was very fond of me, and told me all his doings—named a certain man for treasurer of New York state on the Democratic ticket; he smiled as he told me what that was going to mean, his firm would open offices all over the state and would get the state’s business. After which my worthy relative proceeded to scold me for my budding “radicalism,” and to assure me that our big business leaders were all patriots and men of honor.
Thus I saw the game from the inside, and little by little I came to understand it. Yes, it was true that the boss paid the ignorant foreigners for their votes; but where did the boss get the money for that purpose? The answer, though painful, was plain: he got it from my relative; he got it from all such business men, seeking all such favors and privileges from the state. And here was a further fact which was plain—my relative did not pay the boss for nothing; he intended to get, and did get, a hundred times as much out of the bargain as he paid to the boss and to the political machine of the boss. And that, I found, was the universal rule of this game of graft; the boss was merely an agent, set up by big business men to run the political part of their affairs; and as for the ignorant foreigner, he was a convenience which the business man made use of, in politics as in the labor market.
In the old days of the Tweed ring, the politicians used to steal our money outright; but that is over now, because every politician knows, just as every business man knows, that it is so much better to “make” money than to steal it; you can “make” so much more, and there is no danger of being sent to jail. So nowadays the rule of our politics is “honest graft.” The chiefs of Tammany Hall do not loot the treasury; what they do is to receive blocks of stock in paving companies and construction companies, which do the work for the city at enormous profits; they own stock in the banks which handle the city’s funds; they are in on all the big traction deals; they get up little pet companies, to do this or that service for the public service corporations—to furnish them with ink erasers, or time-clocks, or chewing gum, at several times the market price; and all that is perfectly safe and regular, and instead of sending them to jail we envy them.
I open my morning paper, and here is Arthur Brisbane, sneering at some young men in New York who are starting a paper called “The New Masses”: nobody in America wants to belong to the “masses,” and the young men ought to call their paper, “How to Make a Million the First Year.” Yes, Judd, that is what everybody wants; but can everybody do it? That is a point which Mr. Brisbane, multi-millionaire real estate speculator, fails to cover. But you see how it is: the very essence of “making a million the first year” is that you take it away from other people, who lose in the great business gamble, and remain the “masses,” in spite of desperate determination not to.