Part 1 (1/2)
The Deluge.
by David Graham Phillips.
I. MR. BLACKLOCK
When Napoleon was about to crown himself--so I have somewhere read--they submitted to him the royal genealogy they had faked up for him. He crumpled the parchment and flung it in the face of the chief herald, or whoever it was. ”My line,” said he, ”dates from Montenotte.” And so I say, my line dates from the campaign that completed and established my fame--from ”Wild Week.”
I shall not pause to recite the details of the obscurity from which I emerged. It would be an interesting, a romantic story; but it is a familiar story, also, in this land which Lincoln so finely and so fully described when he said: ”The republic is opportunity.”
One fact only: _I did not take the name Blacklock_.
I was born Blacklock, and christened Matthew; and my hair's being very black and growing so that a lock of it often falls down the middle of my forehead is a coincidence. The malicious and insinuating story that I used to go under another name arose, no doubt, from my having been a bootblack in my early days, and having let my customers shorten my name into Matt Black. But, as soon as I graduated from manual labor, I resumed my rightful name and have borne it--I think I may say without vanity--in honor to honor.
Some one has written: ”It was a great day for fools when modesty was made a virtue.” I heartily subscribe to that. Life means action; action means self-a.s.sertion; self-a.s.sertion rouses all the small, colorless people to the only sort of action of which they are capable--to sneering at the doer as egotistical, vain, conceited, b.u.mptious and the like. So be it! I have an individuality, aggressive, restless and, like all such individualities, necessarily in the lime-light; I have from the beginning lost no opportunity to impress that individuality upon my time. Let those who have nothing to advertise, and those less courageous and less successful than I at advertis.e.m.e.nt, jeer and spit. I ignore them. I make no apologies for egotism. I think, when my readers have finished, they will demand none.
They will see that I had work to do, and that I did it in the only way an intelligent man ever tries to do his work--his own way, the way natural to him!
Wild Week! Its cyclones, rising fury on fury to that historic climax of chaos, sing their mad song in my ears again as I write. But I shall by no means confine my narrative to business and finance. Take a cross-section of life anywhere, and you have a tangled interweaving of the action and reaction of men upon men, of women upon women, of men and women upon one another. And this shall be a cross-section out of the very heart of our life to-day, with its big and bold energies and pa.s.sions--the swiftest and intensest life ever lived by the human race.
To begin:
II. IN THOSE DAYS AROSE KINGS
Imagine yourself back two years and a half before Wild Week, back at the time when the kings of finance had just completed their apparently final conquest of the industries of the country, when they were seating themselves upon thrones encircled by vast armies of capital and brains, when all the governments of the nation--national, state and city--were prostrate under their iron heels.
You may remember that I was a not inconspicuous figure then. Of all their financial agents, I was the best-known, the most trusted by them, the most believed in by the people. I had a magnificent suite of offices in the building that dominates Wall and Broad Streets. Boston claimed me also, and Chicago; and in Philadelphia, New Orleans, St. Louis, San Francisco, in the towns and rural districts tributary to the cities, thousands spoke of Blacklock as their trusted adviser in matters of finance. My enemies--and I had them, numerous and venomous enough to prove me a man worth while--my enemies spoke of me as the ”biggest bucket-shop gambler in the world.”
Gambler I was--like all the other manipulators of the markets.
But ”bucket-shop” I never kept. As the kings of finance were the representatives of the great merchants, manufacturers and investors, so was I the representative of the ma.s.ses, of those who wished their small savings properly invested. The power of the big fellows was founded upon wealth and the brains wealth buys or bullies or seduces into its service; my power was founded upon the hearts and homes of the people, upon faith in my frank honesty.
How had I built up my power? By recognizing the possibilities of publicity, the chance which the broadcast sowing of newspapers and magazines put within the reach of the individual man to impress himself upon the whole country, upon the whole civilized world. The kings of finance relied upon the a.s.siduity and dexterity of sundry paid agents, operating through the stealthy, clumsy, old-fas.h.i.+oned channels for the exercise of power. I relied only upon myself; I had to trust to no fallible, perhaps traitorous, understrappers; through the megaphone of the press I spoke directly to the people.
My enemies charge that I always have been unscrupulous and dishonest. So?
Then how have I lived and thrived all these years in the glare and blare of publicity?
It is true, I have used the ”methods of the charlatan” in bringing myself into wide public notice. The just way to put it would be that I have used for honest purposes the methods of publicity that charlatans have shrewdly appropriated, because by those means the public can be most widely and most quickly reached. Does good become evil because hypocrites use it as a cloak? It is also true that I have been ”undignified.” Let the stupid cover their stupidity with ”dignity.” Let the swindler hide his schemings under ”dignity.” I am a man of the people, not afraid to be seen as the human being that I am. I laugh when I feel like it. I have no sense of jar when people call me ”Matt.” I have a good time, and I shall stay young as long as I stay alive. Wealth hasn't made me a solemn a.s.s, fenced in and unapproachable. The custom of receiving obedience and flattery and admiration has not made me a turkey-c.o.c.k. Life is a joke; and when the joke's on me, I laugh as heartily as when it's on the other fellow.
It is half-past three o'clock on a May afternoon; a dismal, dreary rain is being whirled through the streets by as nasty a wind as ever blew out of the east. You are in the private office of that ”king of kings,” Henry J. Roebuck, philanthropist, eminent churchman, leading citizen and--in business--as corrupt a creature as ever used the domino of respectability.
That office is on the twelfth floor of the Power Trust Building--and the Power Trust is Roebuck, and Roebuck is the Power Trust. He is seated at his desk and, thinking I do not see him, is looking at me with an expression of benevolent and melancholy pity--the look with which he always regarded any one whom the Roebuck G.o.d Almighty had commanded Roebuck to destroy. He and his G.o.d were in constant communication; his G.o.d never did anything except for his benefit, he never did anything except on the direct counsel or command of his G.o.d. Just now his G.o.d is commanding him to destroy me, his confidential agent in shaping many a vast industrial enterprise and in inducing the public to buy by the million its bonds and stocks.
I invited the angry frown of the Roebuck G.o.d by saying: ”And I bought in the Manasquale mines on my own account.”
”On your own account!” said Roebuck. Then he hastily effaced his involuntary air of the engineer startled by sight of an unexpected red light.
”Yes,” replied I, as calm as if I were not realizing the tremendous significance of what I had announced. ”I look to you to let me partic.i.p.ate on equal terms.”
That is, I had decided that the time had come for me to take my place among the kings of finance. I had decided to promote myself from agent to princ.i.p.al, from prime minister to king--I must, myself, promote myself, for in this world all promotion that is solid comes from within. And in furtherance of my object I had bought this group of mines, control of which was vital to the Roebuck-Langdon-Melville combine for a monopoly of the coal of the country.
”Did not Mr. Langdon commission you to buy them for him and his friends?”