Men of Wealth

MISERS

THERE CAN be little doubt that Hetty Green satisfied most of the elements in the definition of a miser. Whatever other ingredients this definition ought to contain, certainly a French version—literally translated—is not amiss: “The love excessive of the silver for it to accumulate.”

Love of money is a spiritual malady that runs through almost all the persons who are the dubious heroes of these chapters. A common observation about men of wealth in which their eulogists indulge is that they “care nothing for money,” that they are interested rather in the things—with the emphasis on the good things—they can do with money. Rockefeller said he looked upon himself as a trustee of his money—God’s trustee. “God gave me my money,” he exclaimed. His great aim was to use it according to God’s will. Certainly much can be said for the wise use which Rockefeller, among all his multimillionaire contemporaries, made of his money. But one may well indulge in a mild surprise on learning that all the stratagems Mr. Rockefeller employed in gathering his riches had the complete approval of his Divine Partner.

The insistence that these rich men “do not love money” is probably made to counteract the impressions made by those misers of fiction and the stage who rub their hands and drool in obscene glee over the little heaps of gold coins—“my little shining darlings.” The dramatists, from Plautus’ Euclio to Molière’s Harpagon and the trembling wretch in The Chimes of Normandy, have established in the common mind a fixed pattern of what the expression “love of money” means.

As a matter of fact, few persons, save perhaps some who are mentally diseased, suffer from the sheer love of the metal we call money. Money itself is merely one form of property. And what these rich men have in varying degrees of virulence is the urge of acquisitiveness—the relentless and forever gnawing appetite to add more and more to what they already possess. And this urge arises, not out of any special affection for the physical possessions, but from certain special uses to which they hope to put these possessions. They want power. They want security. They want glamour. And mixed up with this they have a special talent for accumulation which, like all persons who have special and strong talents, they love to exercise. They find the same delight in the patient, ceaseless planning and execution to make a profit as others do in winning a game of tennis, achieving a low score at golf, or managing large bodies of men in military formations.

All sorts of men want power or want pleasure or want acclaim. But there are all sorts of ways of achieving power, getting pleasure, and winning acclaim. Acquisitive men want the kind of power, the sort of pleasures, and the brand of acclaim that can be purchased with riches. All of them, incidentally, do not have the same acquisitive abilities and, of course, all do not want the same thing. Many of them do not want much more than security. They start out in life with little, or at least some of them do, and acquire much, not through any great ability as producers, but by dint of incessant, patient, remorseless saving and stinting. The miser, therefore, may be said to be an acquisitive man who shrinks from spending. He is a getter, a saver, but not a spender.

Upon examination one is impressed with the fact that most misers are not to be found in any sort of industrial or commercial enterprise, but rather in some business that has to do with the handling of money. The talent for business is not a simple affair. One man is a good salesman, another a good merchandiser, another an excellent manager of men, another has a talent for finance. The misers are usually found among those who have this talent for finance. In some it is great. In others it is meager and, as a rule, at least so I conclude, the misers will be found among those whose talent in handling money is meager.

When we have the man or woman with the acquisitive urge but no special capacity for making money by producing wealth or managing large enterprise, with a bent for finance but not very much talent in that direction, and all this coupled with a powerful element of fear—fear of destitution—we have the authentic miser. For then he supplements his moderate power to earn by an abnormal passion to save, to deprive himself and his family of the necessities of life even, to say nothing of its decencies, in order to accumulate a fund against the day of want.

Some years ago police entered the home of a carpenter in Brooklyn. The children had gone without food for two days. They had no shoes. Investigating, the police found a thousand dollars in bills in a small tin box in a pocket of the father’s coat. When asked why he did not give some money to his wife, he replied in amazement: “Oh, no! I’m saving that.” Saving it, doubtless, against the day of want—a day of worse want than that which was then in his home. Lady Gregory, the writer on Irish folklore, touches, if whimsically yet closely, the germ of this. She tells of the “Man who went beyond the hope of God.” He was a poor peasant who had forty-four potatoes and who could expect no replenishment of his supplies for forty-five days. He reasoned that since there would be one day without a potato he would do well to fast on the first day and thus be able to look forward to forty-four days of safety. But, alas, he starved the first day. The fear of destitution, which is a normal protective caution in all healthy minds, expands to abnormal proportions in the minds of men and women who are not equipped to combat it by successful accumulation of wealth. It expresses itself in intense and even degrading parsimony. And a person who has cultivated this habit of parsimony for many years finds it continuing to dominate the mind even after wealth has been accumulated either through grinding savings or inheritance.

Daniel Dancer, famous London miser, might well have been supposed to be relieved from the terror of destitution when he inherited an income of several thousand pounds a year. But he and his sister continued to live in squalor, to find their food in refuse, to pick up dead bodies of sheep for meat until she died from poisoning as a result. Even then he found a reason not to incur the expense of a doctor. That would be interfering with God’s will, he explained. What did he want money for? Not power, not glory, not pleasure. Only the unconquerable fear of starvation in the end. He lived in his wretchedness to an old age and willed his whole estate to a wealthy noblewoman who visited him in his illness.

A somewhat different type of miser was Thomas Cooke of Islington, of the early eighteenth century. Cooke was a miser with no wealth until he married the widow of a wealthy brewer. But his niggardliness remained unaffected and the widow is said to have died of starvation not long after the marriage. Cooke took no part in the management of his beer making. He continued to assure his safety, not by earning more but by stinting on all things. But in this case, unlike Dancer, he was fond of the good things of life, particularly of good food. He laboriously cultivated many friends, visited them much, hinted that their children would be remembered in his will, and thus got many invitations to dinners and excellent attention. He would, upon occasion, fall down in a simulated fit in front of a good home, would be carried indoors, given good food, would later call to express his gratitude and his determination someday to reward his rescuers, thus getting more good meals. Obviously he could have provided himself with an endless succession of good meals had he had the talent to apply himself to productive business rather than to those humiliating and cheap schemes for getting what was so cheap in those days. He would, when ill, put on rags and call on some benevolent doctor for aid. This will recall Hetty Green’s delivery of her son into the hands of a free clinic to be the subject of a lecture because of an infected leg, and her refusal to pay a doctor when the clinic physicians discovered who she was, the whole story ending with the loss of her son’s leg. Cooke left a fortune of $650,000 entirely to charity when he died at the age of eighty-six.

Of course, these attributes of the miser assume different shades and degrees of meanness. Russell Sage of New York and John Elwes of Southwark, England, were not wholly unlike, save that Sage was probably softened somewhat by his unusual wife. Sage was a character who combined both avarice and parsimony. He was what Wall Street called a skinflint. Although at his death he left an estate of $66,000,000, he lived with the greatest frugality, haggled and bargained, never took a vacation, quarreled with the poor apple woman in Wall Street about the price of her apple, and angrily bargained like an Oriental peddler with the candy man near Trinity Church for a small reduction in price on a slightly soiled bar of chocolate.

He began as a wholesaler, made money as a youth, was elected an alderman of Troy and later to Congress. He made a lot of money as an alderman unloading a local railway on the city of Troy and later is said to have got for himself a large haul when as a banker he settled with his depositors in depreciated paper, taking the currency for himself. He went into Wall Street, which he haunted as a moneylender, speculator, and most of all as a dealer in puts and calls for many decades, about the same time that Hetty Green moved like a witch through its shadows.

Sage lived in a modest, yet decent home, was a devoted husband, and was undoubtedly rescued from more debasing meannesses through the influence of his wife. It is said that she even induced him on one occasion to make a gift of $100,000 to some school. He was coldly and cruelly avaricious. If he was not as miserly as the wretched Dancer or the shabby Cooke, it was because he did possess what they did not have, an extraordinary capacity for making money.

Elwes, in London, did not descend to the same coarse levels of meanness as Cooke because he, too, had never known poverty, having inherited a fortune from his father at the age of four. He came of a family of miserly folk and was congenitally grasping, mean, and stingy. Like Sage, he went into politics, being elected to Parliament for several terms. Like Sage, he could be guilty of an occasional generosity—he made a number of loans to needy colleagues in the House. But, though having an estate of over two million dollars, he lived in a small country seat, kept but a single servant, never traveled in a coach or entered a hotel, riding instead on horseback, detouring through muddy roads to escape the toll gate, slept by the roadside, and, when in London, occupied, instead of a hotel, whatever house or room he could find among his numerous properties, got up early in the morning to walk out a great distance to buy his meat cheap at the farms. When he died he left an estate of $4,000,000.

Such a man as the Duke of Marlborough had in him some of the ingredients of the miser, but they were restrained by certain other qualities, such as his enormous interest in military science and his ambition for power. He lived in a state befitting his rank, but both he and his wife were guilty of an endless number of petty meannesses that in the end lost for them practically every friend they had.

Hetty Green, unlike most misers, had an extraordinary genius for making money out of money, pursuing relentlessly the cruelest bargains, squeezing the highest interest rates through the devious methods of discounts and fees, watching the market with catlike patience for its high points and its low points—buying, as she said, low and selling high. But she took an almost fiendish delight in the power she acquired over men who called themselves rich and powerful and who strode about the world in grandeur while she lived in a dismal flat in Hoboken. But she was pursued by the haunting fear of murder and of losses all her life.

But none of these persons engaged in industrial enterprises as producers of the wealth they craved. They depended wholly upon the scheming management of money.

II

POVERTY

It is not possible to talk so much about wealth without thinking of the reverse of the shield—poverty. There is a widely held, if hazy, notion that poverty is not merely the reverse of wealth but its deformed child; that it is Dives who has created Lazarus. There is another popular conviction that poverty is the creature of the machine age; that this blessed miracle of skill and power, the machine, turns out not merely our prized gadgets but our disprized paupers.

Certainly poverty is no new phenomenon. It did not come in with the machine. In all ages, under all forms of government, in all economic systems there has been widespread poverty. So far as the machine is concerned, the worst indictment that can be brought against it is not that it created poverty, but that it has failed to abolish it.

After all, poverty is not a simple disease. There is the poverty that arises out of natural causes—droughts, famines, plagues. There is the chronic poverty that afflicts large areas of society even in the most favorable times.

Throughout history poverty has been produced by two causes—the convulsions of nature herself and man’s ignorance of his world.

The story of man’s long and agonizing struggle against nature is the most terrible chapter of human history. Almost all the countries in the Old World and most of those in the modern world have been afflicted so persistently by famine and disease that the effect upon their populations has been persistent, filling up the intervals between disasters with poverty. The University of Nanking has made a table showing that between 108 B. C. and A. D. 1911 there were 1828 famines in China—almost one a year somewhere in that unhappy empire. One can understand why a polite salutation on meeting a friend in parts of China is “Have you eaten?” These afflictions have continued in our time. In 1920-21 the drought slew half a million people and rendered twenty million destitute. In 1876-79 the area devastated was 300,000 square miles and the victims from nine to thirteen million human beings.

These famines were caused by droughts, floods, swarms of locusts. Concentrated wealth was not responsible, though it may have accentuated the suffering. Man did not know how to restrain the vengeful hand of cruel nature. His lack of knowledge of the forces against which he had to contend, the rudeness of the instruments with which he worked, his merciless superstitions, his unintelligent social organizations—in a word, his ignorance—accounted for his sufferings.

Concentrated wealth may indeed have aggravated human suffering. An old Sanskrit chronicle tells us that “the Jelham River [in India] was covered with corpses during the drought and the land became strewn with human bones like a burial ground. Yet the king’s minister and guards became rich selling stores of rice at high prices.”

Agra and Delhi were scourged by a severe famine. The governor was Hemu. Of him Badaoni, a contemporary historian, writes: “The people died with the word bread on the lips and yet Hemu valuing the lives of a hundred thousand men at no more than a barley corn, continued to feed 500 elephants upon rice and sugar and butter.”

Abdul Hamid, a native chronicler, writes of a famine in central India in 1628-29: “Men devoured each other and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love. The powdered bones of the dead were mixed with flour.” The Mogul emperor, Shah Jahan, fabulously wealthy, heard of these degrading agonies with ten million dollars of jewels hung around his neck. The curious insensibility of the wealthy rulers to the hunger pangs of their subjects deprived these societies of the aid of the only leadership that could ameliorate their condition. That condition appalls the mind as we read the dreadful record of human degradation under the pressure of hunger, men eating cats and dogs and their own children, waiting like vultures around the scaffold for the bodies of executed criminals.

Men suffered this poverty because they did not know how to prevent or arrest the floods, how to irrigate their lands, or escape from sun-baked prairies to which they were chained by religion, how to prevent the plagues which wiped out in western Europe a third of the population at a stroke and, in cities like Vienna and Bologna, two thirds. This poverty was the fruit of ignorance.

But there is another type of poverty that is chronic in societies and is more nearly related to wealth concentration, though it would be a great mistake to say that this is its chief cause. It inheres in all economic systems. In simpler economic groupings it arises out of men’s weakness, struggling alone against nature to win subsistence from the soil. The isolated feudal social islets depending on the limited resources of their small demesnes and their inability to exchange goods upon any considerable scale with others made the condition of almost all in the community one bordering closely upon poverty. In Japan we find feudal colonies starving next door to other colonies enjoying for the moment at least relative abundance. Seldom able to produce enough for the current year, they were without any reserves when drought or floods or insects interrupted production.

It is found in the world today as in remote ages. Louis Adamic, describing a community in the Black Mountain, Montenegro, writes:

Tsernagora is the same today as it was . . . a hundred years ago. It is as poor as ever. Rocks, rocks, rocks. Sheep, goats, scrawny cattle snatch up every blade of grass as soon as it sticks its point above the stoney bleakness. On tiny patches, few larger than a city lot, and most considerably smaller . . . growing corn, tobacco, cabbage, and potatoes, subsist from one to ten families. But how can they? The cruel and simple answer is that their wants, restricted by centuries of lack and struggle, are extremely small. Thousands of families do not see the equivalent of five dollars throughout the year. . . . Thousands of persons, especially women, live on a meagre piece of crudely baked cornbread and a little sheep or goat cheese a day. Both men and women, if necessary, can go foodless from two days to a week without thinking they are starving.

In the Dalmatian Highlands, Adamic found what he called a land of perennial economic crisis, sugar and salt undreamed-of luxuries, kindling wood at night their only source of light. Toward the end of winter, when food runs short, adults, particularly men, all but entirely refrain from food, strapping flat, specially shaped rocks close to the abdomen to keep the stomach from growling.

The responsibility for this must rest in a variety of sources—the sterile soil, the strange earth tie that binds them to these unyielding hills, the venality and corruption at the center of government. But most of all, populations are impoverished by systems of land ownership that herd swarms of men upon patches of land while great tracts are reserved for the wealthy.

The exactions of the landlord in countries like Japan—not to speak of the United States—keep the tenant farmer poor when he cannot possibly harvest a crop sufficient to keep himself and his landlord. The poor farmer, after paying his rent, has not enough left for subsistence. His lot is hopeless. But we will do well to remember that this is not the consequence of vast fortunes merely. Most of the landlords are small capitalists and many of them are hardly raised above the level of poverty.

In the larger groupings in the populous cities where the more complicated money economy does its mysterious work upon society, there is an inherent flaw. It reveals itself in a process by which portions of the working population are rejected as unusable. We hear much of our early insurance against this defect. Unemployment was eradicated by draining off large numbers of families into what was called our “frontier.” It was so in Athens. Pericles found a frontier in the islands of the Aegean. Rome did the same, parceling out the lands of Italy until they were all gone and then dividing up the lands of conquered provinces.

But in Rome, in Athens, as in the United States, as fast as the social organization was emptied of its excess working population, the system went promptly to work to produce a new surplus. To express it differently and more simply, that is the way capitalist money economy works. Imagine a population of a million workers. Aside from occasional spasms of boom, that society will discard a hundred thousand as useless. If the hundred thousand are moved utterly out of the society by immigration, the remaining nine hundred thousand will soon suffer another convulsion of rejection. Another hundred thousand or more will be found unusable. When they are removed by voluntary or forced exile, the purged society of eight hundred thousand workers will soon mark another ninety thousand or more for rejection. If the frontier is big enough and other forces do not intervene, it will drain away the whole population, after which it will, perhaps, feed them back to the old lands or to new ones if they can be found. The figures I have used are arbitrary and chosen merely to illustrate the point.

This phenomenon finds its origin in the central flaw of the money economy—that up to now no one has discovered how, by healthy means, a sufficient money income can be distributed to all of the workers to enable them to purchase the product of the producing machine.

The concentration of wealth has something to do with this state of affairs, though it is by no means the only cause. Nor are the great aggregations of capital the only concentrations which nourish this fatal defect. Small fortunes may well be as deleterious to the system as large ones.

Nor are all large fortunes equally unhealthy. A fortune like John D. Rockefeller’s, acquired wholly in wealth-producing processes, is by no means as injurious as a fortune like Morgan’s, acquired almost wholly in parasitic functions. The Rockefellers, the Carnegies, Armours, Fords, du Ponts are associated with the creation of wealth-producing machinery. One may very well argue that they have all drawn from the product more than either their ethical or economic share. But in the case of the finance fortunes, they have been acquired by pouncing upon wealth-creating machines already built and developed, capitalizing them for promotional and speculative purposes, reducing the ownership factor to liquid form, and running that liquid form through stock markets into the hands of investors as a means of withdrawing from those investors large gobs of their money savings. These parasitic promotional fortunes are, as a rule, almost wholly injurious and do, actually, play hob in the jamming of the economic system.

Today, in highly organized modern capitalist money economies, the cyclical disaster takes the place of the hurricane, the earthquake, the drought, and the plague. It produces those acute rashes of poverty that break out in our cities and farms when the economic machine breaks down. But the problem of chronic poverty remains; it hangs on in the midst of great booms. It is beyond a doubt associated with the problem of the distribution, not of wealth, but of income, in which problem the man of wealth is a serious factor.