The Driver (9 page)

Nor does anyone know to this day why people were then mad. Economists write about it as the struggle for sound money (gold), against unsound money (silver), and that leaves it where it was. Money is not a thing either true or untrue. It is merely a token of other things which are useful and enjoyable. Both silver and gold are sound for that purpose. Their use is of convenience, and the proportions and quantities in which they shall circulate as currency is rationally a matter of arithmetic. Yet here were millions of people emotionally crazed over the question of which should be paramount, one side talking of the crime of dethroning silver and the other of the gold infamy.

ii

All other business having come to a stop while this matter was at an impasse, a truce was effected in this wise by law: Gold should remain paramount, nominally, but the Treasury should buy each month a great quantity of silver bullion, turn it into white money, force the white money into circulation and then keep it equal to gold in value. Now, the amount of precious metal in a silver dollar was worth only half as much as the amount of precious metal in a gold dollar. Yet Congress decreed that gold and silver dollars should be interchangeable and put upon the Treasury a mandate to keep them equal in value. How? By what magic? Why, by the magic of a phrase. The phrase was: “It is the established policy of the United States to maintain the two metals at a parity with each other by law.”

Naïve trust in the power of words to command reality is found in all mass delusions.

The Coxeyites were laughed at for thinking that prosperity could be created by phrases written in the form of law. Congress thought the same thing. It supposed that the economic distress in the country could be cured by making fifty cents’ worth of silver equal to one hundred cents’ worth of gold, and that this miracle of parity could be achieved by decree.

Anyone would know what to expect. The gold people ran with white dollars to the Treasury and exchanged them for gold and either hoarded the gold or sold it in Europe. In this way the government’s gold fund was continually depleted, and this was disastrous because its credit, the nation’s credit in the world at large, rested on that gold fund. It sold bonds to buy more gold, but no matter how fast it got more gold into the Treasury even faster came people with white money to be redeemed in money the color of red inclining to yellow, and all the time the Treasury was obliged by law to buy each month a great quantity of silver bullion and turn it into white money, so that the supply of white money to be exchanged for gold was inexhaustible.

Wall Street was the stronghold of the gold people. It was to Wall Street that the government came to sell bonds for the gold it required to replenish its gold fund. The spectacle of the Secretary of the Treasury standing there with his hat out, like a Turkish beggar, was viewed exultingly by the gold people.
“Carlisle’s Bonds Won’t Go”
said the New York Sun in a front page headline, on one of these occasions. Carlisle was the Secretary of the United States Treasury, entreating the gold people to buy the government’s bonds with gold. They did it each time, but no sooner was the gold in the Treasury than they exchanged it out again with white money.

This could not go on without wrecking the country’s financial system. That would mean disaster for everyone, silver and gold people alike; yet nobody knew how to stop. The silver people said the solution was to dethrone the gold token and make white money paramount; the others said the only way was to cast the white money fetich into the nearest ash heap and worship exclusively money of the color red inclining to yellow.

iii

Delusions are states of refuge. The mind, unable to comprehend realities or to deal with them, finds its ease in superstitions, beliefs and modes of irrational procedure. It is easier to believe than to think.

The realities of this period in our economic history, apart from the madness, were extremely bewildering. For five or six years preceding there had been an ecstasy of great profits. The prodigious manner in which wealth multiplied had swindled men’s dreams. No one lay down at night but he was richer than when he got up, nor without the certainty of being richer still on the morrow. The golden age had come to pass. Wishing was having. The government had become so rich from duties collected on imported luxuries that the Treasury surplus became a national problem. It could not be properly spent; therefore it was wasted. And still it grew. This time for sure the tree of Mammon would touch the Heavens and human happiness must endure forever.

Then suddenly it had fallen. Speculation, greed and dishonesty had invisibly devoured its heart. The trunk was hollow. Everything turned hollow. People were astonished, horrified and wild with dismay. They would not blame themselves. They wished to blame each other without quite knowing how. The casual facts were hard to see in right relations. Popular imagination had not been trained to grasp them. The whole world was dealing with new forces, resulting from the application of capital to machine production on a vast scale, and there had just appeared for the first time in full magnitude that monstrous contradiction which we name overproduction. This was a world-wide phenomenon, but stranger here than in European countries because this country was newly industrialized on the modern plan and knew not how to manage the conditions it had created; could not understand them in fact.

“Ve are a giant in zwaddling cloths,” exclaimed Mordecai, the Jewish banker, who was one of the directors of the Great Midwestern. He said it solemnly at every directors’ meeting.

Just so. Still, it was incomprehensible to people -generally, and as the pain of loss, chagrin and disappointment unbearably increased the congolmerate mind performed the weird self-saving act of going mad. That is to say, people made a superstition of their economic sins and cast the blame for all their ills upon two objects,—gold and silver tokens. Thus what had been an economic crisis only, subject to repair, became a fiasco of intelligence.

The Europeans, all gold people, who had bought enormous quantities of American stocks and bonds, said: “What now! These people are going crazy. They may refuse ever to pay us back in gold.” Whereupon they began hastily to sell American securities.

“After all,” sighed the London Times, “the United States for all its great resources is a poor country.”

In the panic of 1893 confidence was destroyed. People disbelieved in their own things, in themselves, in each other.

Important banking institutions failed for scandalous reasons. Railroads went headlong into bankruptcy, until more than a billion dollars’ worth of bonds were in default, and in many cases the disclosures of inside speculation were most disgraceful.

United States Senators were discovered speculating in the stock of corporations that were interested in tariff legislation, particularly the Sugar Trust.

The name of Wall Street became accursed, not that morality was lower in Wall Street than anywhere else, but because the consequences of its sins were conspicuous.

All industry sickened.

A scourge of unemployment fell upon the land and labor as such, with no theory of its own about money, knowing only what it meant to be out of work, assailed the befuddled intelligence of the country with that embarrassing question: Why were men helplessly idle in this environment of boundless opportunity?

The Coxeyites thought it was for want of money. So many people thought. They proposed that the government should raise money for extensive public works, thereby creating jobs for the workless, but the United States Treasury, which only a short time before contained a surplus so large that Congress had to invent ways of spending it, was now in desperate straits. The government’s income was not sufficient to pay its daily bills. However, neither the curse of unemployment nor the poverty of the United States Treasury was owing to a scarcity of money. The banks were overflowing with money,—idle money, which they were willing to lend at
¹
/
₂
of 1 per cent, just to get it out of their vaults. In one instance a bank offered to lend a large amount of money without interest. But nobody would borrow money. What should they do with it? There was no profit in business.

So there was unemployment of both labor and capital.

iv

At the time of my arrival in Wall Street conditions were already very bad. They grew worse. There was the shocking disclosure after bankruptcy that one of the principal railroads had deliberately falsified its figures over a period of years. European investors were large holders of the shares and bonds of this property, and naturally the incident caused all American securities to be disesteemed abroad. Foreign selling now heavily increased for that reason, and as the foreigners sold their American securities on the New York Stock Exchange they demanded gold.

The United States Treasury had survived two runs upon its gold fund, but its condition was chronically perilous, and began at length to be despaired of. Gold was leaving the country by every steamer. The feud between the gold and silver people grew steadily more insane and preoccupied Congress to such a degree that it neglected to consider ways and means of keeping the government in current funds. Labor, which had been clamorous and denunciatory, now became militant. Reports of troops being used to quell riots of the unemployed were incessant in the daily news. Wheat fell to a very low price and the farmers embraced Populism, a hot-eyed political movement in which every form of radicalism this side of anarchy was represented. Then came the disastrous American Railway Union strike, bringing organized labor into direct conflict with the authority of the Federal Government. The nation was in a fit of jumps. Public opinion was hysterical.

As I understood more and more the bearing of such events I marvelled at Galt’s solitary serenity. He was still buying Great Midwestern stock, as we all knew. Each time another lot of it passed into his name word of it came up surreptitiously from the transfer office. Some of the directors at the same time were selling out. This fact Harbinger confided to me in a burst of gloom; he thought it very ominous, nothing less than an augury of bankruptcy. I felt that Galt ought to know, yet I hesitated a long time about telling him. My decision finally to do so was sentimental. I had by this time conceived a deep liking for him, and the thought that he was putting his money into Great Midwestern stock,—his own, Gram’ma’s and Vera’s,—while the directors were getting theirs out bothered me in my sleep. But when I told him he grinned at me.

“I know it, Coxey. They didn’t know enough to sell when the price was high, and they don’t know any better now.”

That was all he said. The ethical aspect of the matter, if there was one, apparently did not interest him.

Now befell a magnificent disaster. One of the furnace doors came unfastened in the Heavens, and a scorching wind, a regular sirocco, began to blow in the Missouri Valley. More than half the rich, wealth-making American corn crop was ruined. This was a body-blow for the Great Midwestern. It meant a slump in traffic which nothing could repair. On the third day the news was complete. We received it in the form of private telegraph reports from the Chicago office. They were on my desk when Galt came in. I called his attention to them, but he looked away, saying:

“The Lord is ferninst us, Coxey. Maybe... he... is.”

v

That night I went home with him to dinner. He was in one of his absent moods and very tired. Natalie overwhelmed him as usual in the hallway, and when he neither grumbled nor resisted she put off her boisterous manner and began to look at him anxiously. At dinner everyone was silent. He communicated his mood. Vera was there at her mother’s left. Efforts to make conversation were listless, Galt participating in none of them. There was a sense of something that was expected to happen; that was Gram’ma’s remorseless evening question.

“What is the price of Great Midwestern stock today?” she asked, speaking very distinctly.

“Five and a half,” said Galt, in a petulant voice.

The announcement was received stoically, with not the slightest change of countenance anywhere, though that was the lowest price at which the stock had ever sold and represented a serious loss for the house of Galt. However, the state of feeling made itself felt without words. It became at last intolerable for Galt. He threw down his napkin, shouted three times, “Wow! Wow! Wow!”, and each time brought his fist down on the table with a force that made the china jump. With that he got up and left us. We heard him unlock the door of his room and slam it behind him.

“What has happened?” asked Vera, looking at me.

I told them of the disaster to the corn crop and how for that reason there had been heavy selling of Great Midwestern shares.

Vera shrugged her shoulders. Later in the evening when we were alone she looked about her at the walls and ceiling, as one with a premonition of farewell, and said bitterly: “A pretty shipwreck it will be this time.”

“Has your money gone into it, too?” I asked.

She nodded, and said: “Now he wants to mortgage the house.”

i

B
Y this time I had become a frequent visitor in the Galt household. A summer had passed since my first appearance there. The second time I came to dinner Vera presented herself, though tardily. As she entered the dining room Galt rose and made her an exaggerated bow, which she altogether disregarded.

“All got up this evening!” he said, squinting at her when she was seated. That she disregarded, too, looking cold and bored. She wore a black party gown of some very filmy stuff, cut rather low, with an effect of elaborate simplicity. A small solitary gem gleamed in her blue-black hair and a point of light shone in each of her eyes. She was forbiddingly resplendent, with an immemorial, jewel-like quality. She derived entirely from her mother and in no particular resembled her father. He tried another sally.

“Isn’t it chilly over there by you, Vera child?” he asked, ironically solicitous.