He would say to himself: I am now thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four. I am moving along where I wish to go, and it is only a matter of time. I can wait.
He thought himself alone in his admiration for Stephen’s real genius, for he almost always forgot Jim Purcell. He saw that Stephen was heavily, and constantly, investing in the coal mines around Scranton, to the extent of his financial ability. Only recently, in April, 1871, Stephen had bought more undeveloped acreage, though Wall Street was uneasily aware of the growing depression throughout the country. On the Monday following Black Friday, on September 24, 1869 (when there had been a “corner” on gold), Stephen had quietly bought up huge tracts at an unbelievably low price. He had, two years later, been offered twice what he had paid for the land, though there was a feeling in the nation that a terrible panic was developing. Rufus, who had smiled contemptuously at Stephen’s purchase, now, in November, 1871, cursed himself for his blindness. It takes time to understand everything about a man you intend to ruin, he would say to himself.
One of Rufus’s plans was to eliminate any antagonism which existed between him and his brother, for he alone knew that Stephen had a latent tendency toward suspicion which was only recently becoming evident in small ways. This suspiciousness had formerly been sternly repressed by Stephen, who believed all men to be intrinsically good. Now he was exhibiting some disturbing discretion, if only spasmodically and at very infrequent intervals. Rufus went to the most delicate and strenuous extremes to destroy any possible distrust Stephen might have of him. He never made the smallest decision alone; he consulted Stephen at all times. He was open in his real admiration for his brother; he laughed at his own errors when he talked with Stephen and confessed to impulsiveness. When “troublemakers” on the road cried for an increase in wages, while wages were falling all over the country, and it was only sensible to deny the increases, Rufus upheld Stephen in his decision to accede to the demands in the face of the vehement protests of the board of directors. “Stephen knows what he is doing,” said Rufus seriously. “Look at the trouble the other roads are having.”
Slowly, by the most careful and subtle efforts, Rufus built up a solidarity between Stephen and himself.
There were only two people who dreaded, and suspected, this growing friendship and confidence between the two brothers, and these two were Lydia and Jim Purcell. Lydia dared say nothing to Stephen, for an inexplicable coldness had inserted itself in their formerly profound trust of each other. But Purcell shouldered his rough and massive way into Stephen’s office one afternoon and said in his grating voice, “What is all this between you and Red Rufe? The whole town is talkin’ about you two being so lovey-dovey, and cleavin’ to each other. Are you a fool, eh, Steve? Don’t guess for a minute what he’s up to? Plain as the nose on your damn silly face. He’s out to ruin you, like the spider and fly business.”
Stephen, who had always passively accepted Purcell’s “haunting” as one of the mysteries of life, and as of no particular importance, had risen to a rare anger. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jim. Rufus ruin me? How? I am the president; I have fifty-one per cent of the stock. How could he take all this away from me? It’s ridiculous. You never liked him; there has always been animosity between you two. …”
“Never asked yourself why, did you, Steve?”
“No. I never thought it was important.” Stephen’s pale face flushed.
Purcell pointed a big thick finger almost into his face. “It’s because we’re both scoundrels, Steve, and we both want the same thing: to be the most powerful and richest man in this city, and maybe in the state, sometime. We know all about each other. D’ye think for a minute Rufe’s given up his idea, any more than I’ve given up mine? If you think so, you’re an imbecile. And you’re in danger.”
“Rufus and I are friends,” said Stephen stiffly.
Purcell nodded his huge and shapeless head, and the bulges and pits of his face expressed disgust at this childishness. “I know. He figured it this way. Smart feller, our Rufe. And you’re failin’ right into the pit he’s diggin’ for you. I’m tryin’ to warn you, is all.”
“Why? Why should it matter to you, Jim?”
Purcell was silent. He stood beside Stephen’s desk and pulled at one of his loose and flabby lips. He stared at Stephen intently, then shook his head as if he had been arguing with himself over a hopeless matter. “You’ll never know,” he said at last.
Stephen did not see him again for six months.
Stephen tried to forget Purcell’s warning, but it hovered uneasily in his mind as a kind of betrayal of Rufus. One time he tentatively tried to talk about the matter with his brother, and he said haltingly, “I haven’t seen Jim Purcell lately. Is he out of town? No? He came in to see me one day, and. …”
“And what?” Rufus asked the question smilingly.
But Stephen could not go on. It would be mortally humiliating to Rufus. So he stammered, “It was really nothing. Just a small matter; he’s one of the directors, you know.”
Rufus studied that distressed face, the shifting eyes, the expression of pain, and he knew at once. Rufus was amused, but also alarmed. He watched for any meeting between Stephen and Purcell, and as the months went by and there was no meeting, he was relieved.
One day Rufus and Purcell came face to face on the street. Rufus would have been content to smile and bow, and pass on, but right there, in the center of Portersville, Purcell caught his arm and said loudly, “Look here, Rufe. I’m watchin’ you. Any funny business, and I’ll make you remember I’m one of the directors. Understand?”
Rufus laughed a little. “Why all this drama, Jim? No, I don’t understand you. Why don’t you visit us up on the hill and we’ll all have a little talk about it—Steve, you, and I? And now, please excuse me.”
Purcell, of course, did not come. There were many things happening in the country this November of 1871. The prophesied panic was showing every sign of materializing.
14
The War Between the States had brought great industrial expansion to the North, even during the years of the war. Far behind British industrialization, which was superb, complete, and universal, the Union, discreetly headed by the new buccaneers, had a vision of the United States becoming the industrial empire of the world. Unperturbed, during the war, at the prospect of defeat at the hands of the Southern Confederacy, they were equally unperturbed at the collapse of government credit, for it brought debasement of the currency and a consequent inflation. The prices of all goods leaped upward. Northern citizens, however, paid but vague attention to this, for they were engaged in the immense business of war, consuming and destroying, and over the North a bogus prosperity burgeoned which was enthusiastically proclaimed to be the beginning of “a new era of industrial expansion and limitless wealth and opportunity for all citizens.”
Bankers and investors were able to raise a million dollars a day to pursue the conflict against the South. Meat had poured from Chicago in unbelievable quantities for the military and the people; the production of iron became mountainous; railroads expanded enormously; oil wells spouted in various sections; machines were rapidly invented for farm use in order that farm workers could be drawn off into the Union army. The factories making war goods bulged incredibly. The protective tariffs against foreign goods had operated to the advantage of native manufacturers in the throes of a delirious war prosperity. America, whose industrial growth had been sluggish, now found herself hurling madly into the industrial revolution. All this was regarded joyously by a heedless citizenry who never even dimly perceived that a prosperity created by a war must end in chaos at the end of a war.
Only the farmers were adversely affected. Believing, like their city brethren, that the golden tide of industrial expansion would pour over them also, they had incontinently expanded, and ran into debt. The western farmers particularly suffered. The Hessian fly destroyed crops; the elevators offered but fifteen cents for corn; the farmers signed more notes a
t as much as fifteen or twenty per cent. Only the middleman of the cities prospered on the growing misery of the farmer, who had to pay excessive prices for necessary city-made goods during the war. The custom duties and the internal-revenue taxes were particularly oppressive to the farmer. While the buccaneers of the cities and other prosperous men engaging in the manufacture and sale of war goods to the government nimbly evaded taxes, the farmer could not escape the tax collector and his peering surveillance.
By 1871 the people of America became aware of a frightful breakdown in the morals of their government. Had the war prosperity continued, the citizens would not have cared that corruption extended from Washington into every city and hamlet. But the sudden decline of a war-fevered delirium in the cities, with desperate unemployment, gave the people leisure to observe what had happened and was still happening. There were countless instances of wholesale robbery, including the losses of the insurance companies. Business ethics were completely abandoned in the mad rush to acquire such properties as the railroads, oil wells, and mines, and speculation remained uncontrolled and unchecked. The wounded and exploited South continued to be victimized and made desperate by Northern robbers and swindlers, with the blessing of a supine and corrupt government whose members desired nothing but personal power and gain.
As the American people’s faith declined in their government, their faith declined in themselves and the whole govern mental and business structure. They did not hold themselves guilty of their misery and despair. They thronged the streets vainly looking for employment, while their families starved or became homeless. In the meantime, the banks uneasily remained on the alert, fearful of a run, which, however, was not to materialize for a few months.
The utter collapse of the American economy had been delayed for a short time after the War Between the States by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. English and American industrialists, already disturbed over a threatened economic debacle in 1869, felt reprieved. They competed furiously with each other for the markets supplying France and Germany with war materials, and bad feeling, already very intense between the British and American governments and people, grew to dangerous proportions. England believed the European continent to be her God-endowed source of industrial markets, but now, to her indignation, this new barbarian country, vastly growing and expanding in both cultivated territory and industry, was becoming a sinister threat to the British industrial empire. Britain had hoped that a divided America, still staggering bloodily after a terrible civil war, would be removed from competition in markets for a long time. But, on the contrary, the war had so expanded industry in the United States, and had revealed so many enormously rich natural resources, that for the first time in the nineteenth century Britain had occasion to pause and to fear.
Only a few men anywhere, among them Stephen deWitt, had begun to observe an ominous phenomenon in the world. In past centuries wars had occurred for territory, or by reason of private quarrels between royalty, or as a result of racial antagonisms. Never before had wars deliberately or inadvertently burst out for the control of industrial markets.
And now these few alarmed men began to suspect, without any other evidence but their intuition, that an industrial economy might have to be supported by future wars. As industry expanded, and more and more goods were available in a market bound to contract, or remain the same, or fail to keep up with production, wars would be necessary to produce national prosperity or to eliminate competitors. To these few men this was the utmost in human degradation and infamy.
A crisis had come upon the world, though few realized it. Stephen often thought to himself with consternation: No one has studied the possibility of creating new markets through aid to countries too poor to buy our immensely increasing goods. No one has lifted his voice to insist that progress does not necessarily mean steel mills and endless smoking factories where goods are produced which people cannot buy. There must be a healthy balance between agriculture and industry, or the warehouses of nations will be heaped high with unsold goods while the cities starve for want of food. The rise of great cities will see the decline of agricultural acreage, and while we in America still have more than a safe margin between agriculture and industry, there may very well come a time when that margin is fatally narrowed.
In that event, we shall be forced to engage in wars to consume our goods and to compete for world markets. There is another alternative, and that is less emphasis on the mere possession of goods and more emphasis on spiritual values and the land. Food had always been the answer to men’s problems, and it would remain the answer.
For the first time in the history of the world, men were confusing materialism with progress and civilization. Out of that confusion catastrophe and war would leap from a million open hearts in hundreds of Pittsburghs. The roar of the catastrophe was already gathering sound in every corner of the Western world.
The industrial revolution might very well produce not only a revolution in man’s physical existence but in his moral and spiritual life as well—to his desperate peril.
On November 11, 1871, Stephen deWitt received a letter from Mr. Guy Gunther, senior member of The Gunther Company of New York, financiers and brokers of railroad stocks and bonds. The firm consisted of four brothers, all astute, genial, and rapacious. Guy had been Aaron deWitt’s friend, and between them there had been a guarded respect for each other’s entrepreneur qualities. Friendship, however, had not stood in the way of one or two attempts on Guy’s part to secure the controlling stock of the Interstate Railroad Company on a certain occasion of crisis, some years ago, before the Fielding money had come to the rescue. Nor had Aaron held this against his friend. It was all business.
Rufus had understood this completely, and had never borne any resentment against the powerful New York financier. Only Stephen, the impractical and honorable, had been angered and disgusted. He had hardly acknowledged the presence of Mr. Gunther at his father’s funeral, to the intense if hidden amusement of Rufus and the other man. “Stephen is—incomprehensible,” Guy had murmured to Rufus on one occasion, keeping his face solemn. “He is an idiot,” Rufus had replied, equally as solemnly. Mr. Gunther had smiled, just a little, and had moved away, and Rufus had wondered, with discomfiture, if he had said something ridiculous.
The letter to Stephen was a masterpiece of discreet flattery, admiration, and kindness, and Stephen, to whom hypocrisy was an esoteric language, felt some of the hard affront in him soften. Mr. Gunther was to be in Philadelphia for a few days, “visiting some old friends.” He and Stephen and Rufus had not met for quite a few years, and Mr. Gunther “wondered” if the two brothers would be in “the city” during his, Gunther’s, visit. “It would be refreshing to see you both again, and talk about my dear friend Aaron,” he added.
Stephen read and reread the letter several times. It was after the sixth reading that he became uneasy. He asked his clerk to get him “Mr. Guy Gunther’s file.”
Rufus had read some of the “dossiers” on businessmen and even on casual acquaintances. Nothing was too small for Stephen to note, whether it was to the effect that a local banker had recently bought a new and more elaborate home, or that a lumberman had married off his daughter to a member of a Philadelphia Main Line clan, or a notation that a certain coalmine operator near Scranton was “drinking too much, according to reports.” He has the instincts of a small-town gossip, Rufus would think, enjoying himself.
The Gunther secret file was one of the thickest and heaviest, and Stephen devoted over two silent hours to the study of it.
A few weeks ago Mr. Gunther had “visited” in Chicago, where his wife had some distant American relatives. This interesting fact had been mentioned proudly in the Portersville evening paper, for had not Mr. Gunther been Mr. Aaron deWitt’s friend, and had he not attended Mr. deWitt’s funeral? It was over this last item that Stephen spent at least twenty brooding minutes. Then he asked his clerk to bring him the dossier of the Chicago Railroad System.
; The Chicago Railroad System, though not as old and established as the Interstate Railroad Company, was considered as “sound” as such a railroad could be. “Railroading” was still a precarious business, dependent upon crops and conditions in the nation generally. But precarious as it was, a decline in railroad stocks could bring the threatened “panic” closer, could aggravate it enormously. Stephen knew the officers of the company, and admired them as men of integrity. The Interstate Railroad Company had considerable stock in the System. Stephen’s last notation was to the effect that the System, manned by ambitious men, was planning to build an independent line from the Pittsburgh terminal to Philadelphia, thus carrying all traffic direct from Chicago to Philadelphia and possibly New York. However, Stephen had jotted down with relief, “They are not in a financial condition to do this, thus competing with us, possibly to a disastrous extent. Must watch carefully. Gunther might finance them? In spite of a feud between the company and Gunther? Hardly think so; they despise him.” Another notation: “Who would finance them?”
Stephen read on. The System had “passed” its last dividend. Was this report of their “plans” merely an attempt to bolster faith in themselves in the eyes of the public? Of course, other railroads had “passed” not one but several dividends over the past three years, because of national conditions. The Interstate Railroad Company and the Chicago Railroad System had been almost alone in paying dividends recently.
Stephen read on, his thin brown brows knotted together. Was there a connection between Gunther’s visit to Chicago and the Chicago Railroad System, and another connection with his desire to see the sons of his “dear old friend,” Aaron deWitt? Stephen had had Chicago papers sent to him, and had studied them for any hints that Gunther had met the men from the System. There had been nothing at all. But Stephen continued to frown. Something was moving, somewhere. The Gunthers produced nothing except overextended markets for railroad stock, or panics. It was a horrible thing, to Stephen, that financial pirates were able to create panics at will, for their own profit. He believed there was something terribly wrong in the structure of an economy if the food and wages and shelter of a whole people were at the mercy of the Gunthers and their kind.