William Ghent - Our Benevolent Feudalism

Though M. Vandervelde argues on the basis of these phenomena as observed in Belgium, France, Germany, and England, the same conclusions are applicable in the United States. Our national census figures are practically useless as illuminators on the subject, and one must get his data from the observation or investigation of himself or others. It is generally known that small industries the product of which is more or less ingenious or artistic manage to survive; that those the product of which is common or usual are sooner or later extinguished; and that the petty retailers represent so many heterogeneous elements that it is impossible to predicate anything of them as a class. Of these latter there is a moderate number who, by furnishing a needful social service, make profits; there is a large and constantly changing number who, through ease of credit, manage to obtain stock without capital, and who almost invariably succumb; there is then a larger number whose little shops are run by women and children, the husbands and fathers working at some trade or office job, and hopefully expending their weekly earnings in the vain attempt to “build up a business”; finally, there is a class, the numbers and relative importance of which it is impossible to estimate, whose businesses are owned, directly or indirectly, by other men or by companies.

Many of these so-called independent concerns find it possible, and some of them find it fairly profitable, to continue. But the more the large combinations wax in power, the greater is the subordination of the small concerns. An increasing constraint characterizes all their efforts. They are more closely confined to particular activities and to local territories, their bounds being dictated and enforced by the pressure of the combinations. The petty tradesmen and producers are thus an economically dependent class. Equally subordinate – and for the most part subservient – are the owners of small and moderate holdings in the trusts. The larger holdings – often the single largest holding – determine what shall be done. Generally, too, the petty investors are acquiescent to the will of the Big Men. But occasionally, as in the case of the transfer of the Metropolitan Street Railway stock, they rebel, and it becomes necessary to suppress them. At the meeting which determined this action, the protesting minority were emphatically ordered to “shut up”; when they still objected, the presiding officer declared, “We will vote first; you can discuss the matter afterward,” and the vote was promptly taken. The head of an American corporation, moreover, is often an absolute ruler, who determines not only the policy of the enterprise, but the personnel of the board of directors. It was a naïve letter which a well-known New York financier recently wrote to his “board of directors” on the occasion of his retirement from the presidency of a great trust company in favor of a retiring Cabinet minister. He had been looking about, he explained, for some time for a competent successor. Now he had found him and had chosen him. Of course the formal action of the board would be a welcome detail; and, equally a matter of course, it was promptly given. One of the copper kings recently testified in a legal action that he “didn’t want to call the board of directors together to obtain authority to buy adjacent properties.” He went ahead, did what he pleased, and let the board discuss the matter afterward. If there was ever so much as a question about it, it was but a profitless interference.

The tendencies thus make, on the one hand, toward the centralization of vast power in the hands of a few men – the morganization of industry, as it were – and, on the other, toward a vast increase in the number of those who compose the economically dependent classes. The latter number is already stupendous. The laborers and mechanics were long ago brought under the yoke through their divorcement from the land and the application of steam to factory operation. They are economically unfree except in so far as their organizations make possible a collective bargaining for wages and hours. The growth of commerce raised up an enormous class of clerks and helpers, perhaps the most dependent class in the community. The growth and partial diffusion of wealth has in fifty years largely altered the character of our domestic service and increased the number of servants many fold. The professions, too, have felt the change. Behind many of our important newspapers are private commercial interests which dictate their general policy, if not, as is frequently the case, their particular attitude upon every public question; while the race for endowments made by the greater number of the churches and by all colleges except a few State-supported ones, compels a cautious regard on the part of synod and faculty for the wishes, the views, and the prejudices of men of wealth. To this growing deference of preacher, teacher, and editor is added that of two yet more important classes, – the makers and the interpreters of law. The record of legislation and judicial interpretation regarding slavery previous to the Civil War has been paralleled, if not surpassed, in recent years by the record of legislatures and courts in matters relating to the lives and health of manual workers, especially in such matters as employers’ liability and factory inspection. Thus, with a great addition to the number of subordinate classes, with a tremendous increase of their individual components, and with a corresponding growth of power in the hands of a few score magnates, there is needed little further to make up a socio-economic status that contains all the essentials of a renascent Feudalism.

With the rise of the magnates to power comes a growing self-consciousness of their authority and responsibility. “I am a citizen of no mean state,” is the reflection of each of them as he looks upon the emergent order of which he is so large a part; and thereupon it becomes his mission to live up to his rank and function. Frequently his benefactions increase, and always he takes on a more Jovian air, and views with a more providential outlook the phenomena passing before and about him. He is a part not only, as Tennyson makes Ulysses say, of all that he has met, but of the primary causes of things. He is at once the loaf-giver to the needy, the regulator of temporal affairs, the lord protector of church and society; and he holds his title directly from the Creator. “The rights and interests of the laboring man,” wrote the chief of the anthracite coal magnates last August, “will be protected and cared for, not by the labor agitators, but by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of the country.” Gradually there comes the renascent development of the seigniorial mind.

“Business” is the main thought, and the apotheosis of “business” the main cult of the new magnates. “Of gods, friends, learnings, of the uncomprehended civilization which they overrun,” indignantly writes Mr. Henry D. Lloyd, “they ask but one question: How much? What is a good time to sell? What is a good time to buy?.. Their heathen eyes see in the law and its consecrated officers nothing but an intelligence office, and hired men to help them burglarize the treasures accumulated for a thousand years at the altars of liberty and justice, that they may burn their marble for the lime of commerce.”

Though a forcible, it is an extreme view, for it leaves out of consideration the high professions of morality, the frequent appeal to Christian ideals, the tender solicitude for honesty, integrity, law and order, with which our new magnates gild their worship of “business.” Such of them as have recently invaded literature give edifying glimpses of the new seigniorial attitude. The artistic career, writes Mr. Andrew Carnegie in his entertaining volume, “The Empire of Business,” is most narrowing, and produces “petty jealousies, unbounded vanities, and spitefulness”; the learned professions also produce narrowness, albeit often a high specialization of faculty and knowledge. But “business,” properly pursued, broadens and develops the whole man. It is a view echoed to greater or less extent by the other literary magnates, particularly Mr. James J. Hill, Mr. Russell Sage, Mr. S. C. T. Dodd, Mr. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Hon. Marcus A. Hanna, and Mr. Charles R. Flint.