It happened that at this time Lincoln Steffens was publishing his terrible exposés of the corruption of American civic life. Steffens did for the American people one specific service. He knocked out forever the notion, of which E. L. Godkin and his “New York Evening Post” were the principal exponents, that our political corruption was to be blamed upon “the ignorant foreign element.” Steffens showed that purely American communities, such as Rhode Island, were the most corrupt of all; and he traced back the corruption, showing that for every man who took a bribe there was another man who gave one, and that the giver of the bribe made from ten to a thousand times as much as he paid. In other words, American political corruption was the buying up of legislatures and assemblies to keep them from doing the people’s will and protecting the people’s interests; it was the exploiter entrenching himself in power, it was financial autocracy undermining and destroying political democracy.
Steffens did not go so far as that in the early days. He just laid bare the phenomena, and then stopped. You searched in vain through the articles which he published in “McClure’s” for any answer to the question: What is to be done about it? So I wrote what I called “An Open Letter to Lincoln Steffens.” I cannot find it now, but I recall the essence of it well enough.
“Mr. Steffens, you go from city to city and from state to state, and you show us these great corporations buying public privileges and capitalizing them for tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, and unloading the securities upon the general investing public. You show this enormous mass of capital piling up, increasing at compound interest, demanding its toll of dividends, which we, the people who do the hard work of the world, who produce the real wealth of the world, must continue forever to pay. I ask you to tell us, what are we to do about this? Shall we go on forever paying tribute upon this mass of bribery and fraud? Can we go on paying it forever, even if we want to? And if not, what then? What will happen when we refuse to pay?”
I sent this letter to Steffens, to see what he thought about it. He replied that it was the best criticism of his work that he had seen, and he tried to persuade “McClure’s” to publish it, but in vain. I forget whether it was he or I who sent it to “Collier’s Weekly”; but anyway, the article was read and accepted, and Robert J. Collier, the publisher, wrote and asked me to come to see him.
Picture me at this moment, a young writer of twenty-five who has been pleading with the American public to remember its high traditions, and has seen his plea fall flat, because the newspapers and magazines overlooked him; also—a painful detail, but important—who has been supporting a wife and baby on thirty dollars a month, and has been paid only five hundred dollars for two years work on a novel. A friend who knows the literary world tells me that this is the chance of my life. “Collier’s” is run “on a personal basis,” it appears; a sort of family affair. “If Robbie likes you, your fortune is made,” says my friend. “This is your ‘open sesame’ to the public mind.”
Well, I go to see Robbie, and it appears that Robbie likes me. I am young and ascetic-looking; the tension under which I have worked has given me dyspepsia, so my cheeks are hollow and my skin is white and my eyes have a hectic shine. Robbie, no doubt, is moved to sympathy by these phenomena; he himself is a picture of health, florid and jolly, a polo-player, what is called a “good fellow.” He asks me, will I come to dinner at his home and meet some of his friends and his editorial staff? I answer that of course I will.
My worldly-wise friend insists that I shall invest my spare savings in a dress-suit, but I do not take this advice. I go to Robbie’s palatial home in my old clothes, and Robbie’s velvet-footed butler escorts me upstairs to Robbie’s dressing-room, where Robbie’s valet is laying out his things on the bed. And while Robbie is dressing, he tells me again how much he admires my article. It is the most illuminating discussion of present-day problems that he has ever read. He and his friends don’t meet many Socialists, naturally, so I am to tell them about Socialism. I am to tell them everything, and needn’t be afraid. I answer, quite simply, that I shall not be in the least afraid.
The evening was spoiled because Robbie’s father came in. Old Peter Collier was a well-known character in New York “society”; but as not all my readers have been intimate in these circles, I explain that he had begun life as a pack-peddler, had started “Collier’s Weekly” as an advertisement sheet, and by agents offering books as premiums had built up a tremendous circulation. Now he was rich and important; vulgar, ignorant as a child, but kind-hearted, jovial—one of those nice, fatherly old fellows who put their arms about you, no matter who you are.
And here he had come in to dinner with his son, and found his son entertaining a Socialist. “What? What’s this?” he cried. It was like a scene in a comedy. He would hear one sentence of what I had to say, and then he would go up in the air. “Why—why—that’s perfectly outrageous! Who ever heard of such a thing?” He would sputter for five or ten minutes, to the vast amusement of the rest of the guests.
Presently he heard about the “Open Letter to Lincoln Steffens.” “What’s this? You are going to publish an article like that in my magazine? No, sir! I won’t have it! It’s preposterous!” And there sat Robbie, who was supposed to be the publisher; there sat Norman Hapgood, who was supposed to be the editor—and listened to Old Peter lay down the law. Norman Hapgood has since stated that he does not remember this episode, that he never knew Peter Collier to interfere with the policy of the magazine. Well, the reader may believe that the incident was not one that I would forget in a hurry. Not if I should live to be as old as Methuselah will I forget my emotions, when, after the dinner, the old gentleman got me off in a corner and put his arm around my shoulders. “You are a nice boy, and I can see that you’ve got brains, you know what you’re talking about. But what you ought to do is to put these ideas of yours into a book. Why do you try to get them into my magazine, and scare away my half million subscribers?”