Since then, such depraved literature has been poured in a flood over America, and our bright young intellectuals are thoroughly initiated; they have no shells of puritanism, but try fancy liquors and drugs, and play with the esoteric forms of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and commit suicide in the most elegant continental style. Those who prefer to remain alive are set down as old fogies. I must be one of the oldest.
VIII
My Uncle Bland was in the habit of coming to New York every now and then, and I always went to the old Holland House or the Waldorf-Astoria to have lunch or dinner with him and my aunt. One of these visits is fixed in my mind, because I was proud of my achievement in learning to read French in six weeks and told my uncle about it. It was then that he made me a business offer; he was going soon to have a Paris branch of his company, and if I would come to Baltimore and learn the business, he would put me in charge of his Paris branch, starting at six thousand a year. I thanked my good uncle, but I never considered the offer, for I felt sure of one thing, that I would never engage in any form of business. Little did I dream that fate had in store for me the job of buying book paper by the carload, and making and selling several million books; to say nothing of a magazine, and a socialist colony, and a moving picture by Eisenstein!
At this time, or a little later, my uncle was occupied in establishing the New York office of his bonding company; this played an important part in my education. To his favorite nephew the president of the great concern talked freely, and he gave me my first real knowledge of the relationship between government and big business in America. This Baltimore company, desiring to break into the lucrative New York field, proceeded as follows: one of the leaders of Tammany Hall, a man by the name of O’Sullivan, became manager of the New York office; Richard Croker, the “big chief,” received a considerable block of stock, and other prominent Tammany men also received stock. My uncle explained that, as a result of this procedure, word would go forth that his company was to receive the bonding business of the city and all its employees.
It was the system that came to be known as “honest graft.” You can see that it was no crime for a Tammany leader to become manager of a bonding company; and yet his profits would be many times as great as if he were to steal money from the city treasury. Some time afterward my uncle told me that he planned to open an office in Albany, and was going to get the business of the state machine also; he had just named the man who was to be elected state treasurer on the Democratic ticket—and when I asked him what this meant, he smiled over the luncheon table and said, “We businessmen have our little ways of getting what we want.”
So there I was on the inside of America, watching our invisible government at work. The pattern that my uncle revealed to me in youth served for the arranging of all the facts I later amassed. I have never found anything different, in any part of America; it is thus that big business deals with government at every point where the two come into contact. Every government official in America knows it, likewise every big businessman knows it; talking in private, they joke about it; in public they deny it with great indignation.
The fact that the man from whom I learned this secret was one of the kindest and most generous persons I have ever known ought to have made me merciful in my judgments. With the wisdom of later years, I know that the businessmen who finance political parties and pull the strings of government cannot help what they do; they either have to run their business that way or give place to somebody who will run it no differently. The blame lies with the system, in which government for public service is competing day by day with business for private profit. But in those early days I did not understand any of this; I thought that graft was due to grafters, and I hated them with all my puritanical fervor.
Also, I thought that the tired businessman ought to be an idealist like myself, reading Shakespeare and Goethe all day. When my uncle, thinking to do me a kindness, would buy expensive theater tickets and take my mother and myself to a musical comedy, I would listen to the silly thumping and strumming and the vulgar jests of the comedians, and my heart would almost burst with rage. This was where the world’s money was going—while I had to live in a hall bedroom and slave at potboilers to earn my bread!
It happened that at this time I was taking a course in “Practical Ethics” under Professor James Hyslop at Columbia. The second half of this course consisted of an elaborate system that the professor had worked out, a set of laws and constitutional changes that would enable the voters to outwit the politicians and the big businessmen. From the very first hour it was apparent to me that the good professor’s elaborate system was a joke. Before any law or constitutional change could be made, it would have to be explained to the public, which included the politicians and their paymasters. These men were quite as shrewd as any college professor and would have their plans worked out to circumvent the new laws a long time before those laws came into operation.