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BOOK FOUR
CROWDS AND HEROES
CHAPTER IV
THE CROWD AND PIERPONT MORGAN
ONE keeps turning back every now and then, in reading the
"Life of Pierpont Morgan," to the portrait which Carl Hovey
has placed at the beginning of the book. If one were to look at
the portrait long enough, one would not need to read the book.
The portrait puts into a few square inches of space what Mr.
Hovey takes half an acre of paper for. And all that he really
does on the half-acre of paper is to bring back to one again
and again that set and focused look one sees in Mr. Morgan's
eyes—the remoteness, the silence, the amazing, dogged, im-
placable concentration, and, when all is said, a certain terrible,
inexplicable blindness.
The blindness keeps one looking again. One cannot quite
believe it. The portrait has something so strong, so almost
noble and commanding, about it that one cannot but stand
back with one's little judgments and give the man who can hurl
together out of the bewilderment of the world a personality
like this, and fix it here—all in one small human face—the
benefit of the doubt. This is the way the crowd has always
taken Pierpont Morgan at first. The bare spectacle of a man
so magnificently set, so imperiously preoccupied, silences our
judgments. It seems as if, of course, he must be seeing things
—things that we and others possibly do not and cannot see.
The blindness in the eyes is so complete and set in such a full
array that it acts at first on one almost like a kind of vision.
The eyes hold themselves like pictures of eyes, like little walls,
as if real eyes were in behind them. One wonders if there is any
one who could ever manage to break through them, fleck up little
ordinary human things—personality, for instance, atmosphere, [308]
or light—against them. If Shakespeare, whose folios he has,
and Keats, whose,"Endymion"he owns, or Milton, whose"Par-
adise Lost" he keeps in his safe, were all to assail him at once,
were to bear down upon that set look in Pierpont Morgan's eyes
—try to get them to turn one side a second and notice that they
—Shakespeare and Milton and Keats—were there, there
would not be a flicker or shadow of movement. They are eyes
that are set like jaws, like magnificent spiritual muscles, on
Something. Neither do they reveal light or receive it.
. . . . . . .
It will be some time before the crowd will find it possible to
hand in an account and render a full estimate of the value of the
service that Pierpont Morgan has rendered to our modern
world; but the service has been for the most part rendered now
and while the world, in its mingled dismay and gratitude at the
way he has hammered it together, is distributing its praise and
blame, there are some of us who would like to step one side a little
and think quietly, if we may, not about what Pierpont Morgan
has done, which we admit duly, but about the blindness in his
eyes. It is Pierpont Morgan's blindness that interests the
crowd more than anything else about him interests them now.
It is his blindness—and the chance to find out just what it is
that is making people read his book. His blindness (if we can
fix just what it is) is the thing that we are going to make our next
Pierpont Morgan out of. The next Pierpont Morgan—the
one the crowd is getting ready now—will be made out of the
things that this Pierpont Morgan did not see. What are these
things? We have been looking for the things in Carl Hovey's
book, peering in between the lines on every page, and turning
up his adjectives and looking under them, his adverbs and quali-
fications, his shrewdness and carefulness for the things that
Pierpont Morgan did not see. Pierpont Morgan himself
would not have tried to hide them, and neither has his biog-
rapher. His whole book breathes throughout with a just- [309]
mindedness, a spirit of truth, a necessary and inevitable hon-
esty, which of itself is not the least testimony to the essential
validity and soundness of Morgan's career. Pierpont Mor-
gan's attitude toward his biography (if, in spite of his reticence,
it became one of the necessities—even one of the industrial
necessities, of the world that he should have one) was prob-
ably a good deal the attitude of Walt Whitman when he told
Traubel, "Whatever you do with me, don't prettify me"; and
if there were things in Mr. Morgan's career which he imperturb-
ably failed to see, Mr. Morgan himself would be the last man
not to try to help people to find out what they are. But living
has been to Mr. Morgan as it is to us (as I write these lines he
is seventy-four years old) a serious, bottomless business. He
does not know which the things are he has not seen. His
eyes are magnificently set. They cannot help us. We must
do our own looking.
. . . . . . .
If I were called upon to speak very quickly and without
warning; if anyone suddenly expected me in my first sentence
to hit the bull's-eye of Mr. Morgan's blindness, I think I would
try socialism. When the Emperor William was giving himself
the treat of talking with the man who runs, or is supposed to
run, the economics of a world, he found that he was talking with
a man who had not noticed socialism yet, and who was not in-
terested in it. Most people would probably have said that
Morgan was not interested in socialism enough; but there are
very few people who would not be as surprised as Emperor Wil-
liam was to know that he, Pierpont Morgan, was not informed
about the greatest and, to some of us, the most threatening,
omnipresent, and significant spectre in modern industrial life.
But when one thinks of it, and, when more particularly, one
looks again at that set look in his eyes, I cannot see how it
could possibly have been otherwise. If Morgan's eyes had
suddenly begun seeing all sorts of human things—the bewilder- [310]
ing welter of the individual minds, the tragedy of the individual
interests around him; if he had lost his imperious sense of a
whole—had tried to potter over and piece together, like the
good people and the wonderers, the innumerable entangled wires
of the world, his eyes might have been filled perhaps with the
beautiful and helpless light of the philosophers, with the fire of
the prophets, or with the gentle paralysis of the poets, but he
never would have had the courage to do the great work of his
life—to turn down forever those iron shutters on his eyes
and smite a world together.
There was one thing this poor, dizzied, scattered planet
needed. With its quarrelling and its peevish industries, its
sick poets and its tired religions, the one thing this planet
needed was a Blow; it needed a man that could hammer it to-
gether. To find fault with this man for not being a seer, or to
feel superior to him for not being an idealist, or to heckle him
for not being a sociologist, when here he was all the time with
this mighty frenzy or heat in him that could melt down the
chaos of a world while we looked, weld it to his will, and then
lift his arm and smite it, though all men said him nay—back
into a world again—to heckle over this man's not being a com-
plete sociologist or professor is not worthy of thoughtful and
manful men.
I cannot express it, but I can only declare, living as I do in a
day like this, that to me there is a kind of colossal naked poetry
in what Pierpont Morgan has done which I cannot but acknowl-
edge with gratitude and hope. Though there be in it, as in
all massive things, a brutality perhaps like that of the moving
glaciers, like the making and boiling of coal in the earth, like
death, like childbirth, like the impersonality of the sea, my
imagination can never get past a kind of elemental, almost
heathen poetry or heathen-god poetry in Pierpont Morgan's
Blow or shock upon our world. There may be reason to doubt
as to whether it is to be called a heaven-poetry or a hell-poetry
—something so gaunt and simple is there about it; but here [311]
we are with all our machines around us, with our young, rough,
fresh nations in the act of starting a great civilization once
more on this old and gentle earth, and I can only say that po-
etry (though it be new, or different, or even a little terrible) is
the one thing that now, or in any other age, men begin great
civilizations with.
. . . . . . .
I have tried to express the spirit of what Morgan's genius
seized unconsciously by the grim, resistless will of his age, has
wrought into his career.
But in the background of my mind as I see Pierpont Morgan,
there is always the man who will take his place, and if I did not
see the man coming, and coming rapidly, who is to take Mr.
Morgan's place, I admit that Mr. Morgan himself would be a
failure, a disaster, a closed wall at the end of the world.
No one man will take Mr. Morgan's place, but the typical
man in the group of men that will take his place will justify Mr.
Morgan's work, by taking this world in his hand and riveting
his vision on where Morgan's vision leaves off. As Morgan
has fused railroads, iron, coal, steamships, seas, and cities, the
next industrial genius shall fuse the spirits and the wills of men.
The Individualists and the Socialists, the aristocracies and
democracies, the capitalists and the labourers shall be welded
together, shall be fused and transfused by the next Morgan
into their ultimate, inevitable, inextricable, mutual interests.
The chief characteristic of the new industrial leader is coming
to be social imagination or the power of seeing the larger in-
dustrial values in human gifts and efficiencies, the more human
and intellectual energies of workmen, the market value of their
spirits, their imaginations, and their good-will. The underpin-
ning and Morganizing work has been done; the power of in-
stant decision which Mr. Morgan has had, has been very often
based on a lack of imagination about the things that got in his
way; but the things that get in the way now, the big, little- [312]
looking things—are the things on which the new and inspired
millionaires' imagination will find its skill and accumulate its
power. It is men's spirits that are now in the way; they have
been piling up and accumulating under Morgan's regime long
enough, and it is now their turn. Perhaps men's spirits have
always been beyond Mr. Morgan, and perhaps his imagination
has been worked largely as a kind of cerebellum imagination: it
is a kind of imagination that sees related and articulated the
physical body of things, the grip on the material tools, on
the gigantic limbs of a world. The man who succeeds Mr.
Morgan, and for whom Mr. Morgan has made the world ready,
is the man who has his imagination in the upper part of his
brain, and instead of doing things by not seeing, and by not
being seen, he will swing a light. He will be himself in his own
personality, a little of the nature of a searchlight, and he will
work the way a searchlight works, and will have his will with
things by seeing and lighting, by X-raying his way through them
and not by a kind of colossal world-butting, which is Morgan's
way, both eyes imperiously, implacably shut, his whole being
all bent, all crowded into his vast machine of men, his huge will
lifted . . . and excavating blindly, furiously, as through
some groping force he knew not, great subcellars for a new
heaven and new earth.
The Crowd gets its heroes one at a time. Heroes are the
Crowd's tools. Some are dredges, some are telescopes. The
Crowd, by a kind of instinct—an oversoul or undersoul of
which it knows not until afterward, takes up each tool grop-
ingly—sometimes even against its will and against its con.
science, uses it and drops it.
Then it sees why, suddenly, it has used it.
Then God hands it Another One.
CHAPTER V
THE CROWD AND TOM MANN
I DROPPED into the London Opera House the other night
to see Tom Mann (the English Bill Heywood), another hero or
crowd spy-glass that people have taken up awhile—thousands
of them—to see through to what they really want. I wanted
to hear him speak, and see, if I could, why the crowd had
I taken him up, and what it was they were seeing through
him.
I am apt to take a dead set at liking a man I do not agree
with, if I can. It gives one a better start in understanding
him and in not agreeing with him to some purpose.
But it was not necessary to try to like Tom Mann or to
make arrangements for being fair to him. He came up on
the platform (it was at Mr. Hyndmann's Socialist rally) in
that fine manly glow of his of having just come out of jail
(and a jail, whatever else may be said about it, is certainly
a fine taking place to come out of—to blossom up out of,
like a night-blooming cereus before a vast, lighted-up, up-
roarious audience). It is wonderful how becoming a jail
is to some people! Had I not seen Mrs. Pethick Lawrence
with the flush of Old Bailey on her cheek only a little while
before in Albert Hall?
If Tom Mann had had, like Elisha, that night, a fiery chariot
at his disposal, and had come down, landed plump out of
heaven on his audience, he could not have done half as well
with it as he did with that little gray, modest, demure Salford
Jail the kind Home Secretary gave him.
He tucked the jail under his arm, stood there silently
before us in a blaze of light. Everbody clapped for five [314]
minutes.
Then he waved the air into silence and began to speak.
I found I had come to hear a simple-minded, thoughtless,
whole-hearted, noisy, self-deceived, hopelessly sincere person.
He was a mere huge pulse or muscle of a man. All we could
do was to watch him up there on the platform (it was all
so simple!) taking up the world before everybody in his big
hands and whacking on it with a great rapping and sounding
before us all, as if it were Tommy's own little drum mother
gave him. He stood there for some fifteen minutes, I should,
think, making it—making the whole world rat-a-tat-tat to
his music, to Tommy's own music, as if it were the music of
the spheres.
Mr. Mann's gospel or hope for mankind seemed to be to
have all the workers of the world all at once refuse to work.
Have the workers starve and silence a planet, and take over
and confiscate the properties and plants of capital, dismiss
the employers of all nations and run the earth themselves.
. . . . . . .
I sat in silence. The audience about me broke out into
wild, happy appreciation.
It acted as if it had been in the presence of a vision. It
was as if, while they sat there before Tom Mann, they had seen
being made, being hammered out before them, a new world.
I rubbed my eyes.
It seemed to me precisely like the old one. And all the
trouble for nothing. All the disaster, the proposed starva-
tion, and panic for nothing.
There was one single possible difference in it.
We had had before, Pierpont Morgan, the Tom Mann of
the banks, riding astride the planet, riding it out with us—
with all the rest of us helpless on it, holding on for dear life,
riding out into the Blackness.
And now we were having instead, Tom Marin, the Pierpont [315]
Morgan of the Trades Unions, riding astride the planet,
riding it out with us, with all the rest of us helpless on it,
holding on for dear life, riding out into the Blackness.
Of course Pierpont Morgan and Tom Mann are both very
useful as crowd spy-glasses for us all to see what we want
through.
But is this what we want?
Is it worth while to us, to the crowd, to all classes of us,
to have our world turned upside down so that we can be bul-
lied on it by one set of men instead of being bullied on it by
another?
This is the thing that the Crowd, as it takes up one hero after
the other, and looks at the world through him, is seeing next.
Some of us have seen sooner than the others. But we
are nearly all of us seeing to-day. We have stood by now
these many years through strikes and rumours of strikes,
and we have watched the railway hold-ups, the Lawrence
Mill strike, and the great English coal strike. We have
seen, in a kind of dumb, hopeful astonishment, everybody
about us piling into the fray, some fighting for the rights
of labour and some for the rights of capital, and we have
kept wondering if possibly a little something could not be
done before long, possibly next year, in behalf of the huge,
battered, helpless Public, that dear amorphous old ladylike
Person doddering along the Main Street of the World, now
being knocked down by one side and now by the other. It
has almost looked, some days, as if both sides in the quarrel—
Capital and Labour, really thought that the Public ought
not to expect to be allowed to be out in the streets at all.
Both sides in the contest are so sure they are right, and feel
so noble and Christian, that we know they will take care
of themselves; but the poor old Lady!—some of us wonder,
in the turmoil of Civilization and the scuffle of Christianity,
what is to become of Her.
Is it not about time that somebody appeared very soon [316]
now who will make a stand once and for all in behalf of this
Dear Old Lady-Like Person?
Is it really true that no one has noticed Her and is really
going to stand up for Her—for the old gentle-hearted Planet
as a Whole?
We have our Tom Mann for the workers, and we have
the Daily Newspaper—the Tom Mann of Capital, but where
is our Tom Mann for Everybody? Where is the man who
shall come boldly out to Her, into the great crowded highway,
where the bullies of wealth have tripped up her feet, and
the bullies of poverty have thrown mud in her face, where
all the little mean herds or classes one after the other hold
Her up—the scorners, and haters, and cowards, and fearers
for themselves, fighting as cowards always have to fight,
in herds. . . . where is the man who is going to climb
up alone before the bullies of wealth and the bullies of poverty,
take his stand against them all—against both sides, and dare
them to touch the dear helpless old Lady again?
When this man arises—this Tom Mann for Everybody
—whether he slips up into immortality out of the crowd
at his feet, and stands up against them in overalls or in a
silk hat, he will take his stand in history as a man beside
whom Napoleon and Alexander the Great will look as toys
in the childhood of the world.
. . . . . . .
We are living in a day when not only all competent-minded
students of affairs, but the crowd itself, the very passers-by
in the streets, have come to see that the very essence of
the labour problem is the problem of getting the classes to
work together. And when the crowd watches the labour
leader and sees that he is not thinking correctly and cannot
think correctly of the other classes, of the consumers and
the employers, it drops him. Unless a leader has a class
consciousness that is capable of thinking of the other classes [317]
—the consumers and employers, so shrewdly and so close
to the facts that the other classes, the consumers and the
employers, will be compelled to take him seriously, tolerate
him, welcome him, and cooperate with him, the crowd has
come at last to recognize promptly that he is only of tempo-
rary importance as a leader. He is the by-product of one of
the illusions of labour. When the illusion goes he goes.
Capital has been for some time developing its class con-
sciousness. Labour has lately been developing in a large
degree a class consciousness.
The most striking aspect of the present moment is that
at last, in the history of the world, the Public is developing
a class consciousness.
The Crowd thinks.
And as from day to day the Crowd thinks—holds up its
little class heroes, its Tom Manns and Pierpont Morgans, and
sees its world through them—it comes more and more to
see implacably what it wants.
It has been watching the Tom Mann, or Bill Heywood type
of Labour leader, for some time.
There are certain general principles with regard to labour
leaders that the crowd has come to see by holding up its heroes
and looking through them, at what it wants. The first great
principle is that no man needs to be taken very seriously,
as a competent leader of a great labour movement who is
merely thinking of the interest of his own class.
The second general principle the Crowd has come to see,
and to insist upon—when it is appealed to (as it always is,
in the long run) is that no labour leader needs to be taken
very seriously or regarded as very dangerous or very useful
—who believes in force.
A labour leader who has such a poor idea that a hold-up
is the only way he can express it—the Crowd suspects. The
only labour leaders that the Crowd, or people as a whole,
take seriously are those that get things by thinking and [318]
by making other people think.
The Crowd wants to think.
The Crowd wants to decide.
And It has decided to decide by being made to think and
not by being knocked down.
It is not precisely because the Crowd is not willing to be
knocked down, and has not shown itself to be over and over
again, when it thought its being knocked down might pos-
sibly help in a just cause.
But it has not been through coal strikes, Industrial Workers
of the World, and syndicalist outbreaks for nothing.
It is not the knocking down indulged in by labour and by
capital that the Crowd fears.
It is the not-thinking.
The Crowd has noticed that the knocking-down disposi-
tion and the not-thinking disposition go together.
The Crowd has watched Force and Force-people, and
has seen what always happens after a time.
It has come to see that people who have to get things by
force and not by thinking will not be able to think of any-
thing to do with the things when they get them.
So the Crowd does not want them to get them.
The Crowd has learned all this even from the present own-
ers of things. It does not want to learn them all over again
from new ones. The present owners of things have got them
half by force, and that is why they only half understand
how to run them.
But they do half understand because they only half be-
lieve in force. The crowd has seen them get their supremacy
by the use of the employment-hold-up, or by starving or
threatening to starve the workers. And now it sees the
Syndicalist workers proposing to get control by starving or
threatening to starve everybody. Of the two, those who
propose to starve all the people to get their own way, and
those who threaten to starve part of the people, it has seemed [319]
to the Crowd, naturally, that those who only half believe
in starving, and who only starve a part of us, would be
likely to be more intelligent as world-runners.
In other words (accepting for the sake of argument the
worst possible interpretation of the capitalist class), they
have spent several years in learning, and have already half
learned that force in industry is inefficient and cannot be
made to work.
Now when the Crowd sees the Syndicalists swinging their
hats in a hundred nations, with one big hoarse hurrah around
a world, with five minutes' experience, come rushing in, and
propose to take up the world—the whole world in two min-
utes more and run it in the same old bygone way—the way
that the capitalists are just giving up—by force—it knows
what it thinks.
It thinks it will fight Class Syndicalism. It makes up
its mind it will fight Class Syndicalism with Crowd Syndi-
calism. It has decided that, in the interests of all of us,
of a crowd civilization, of what we call the world or Crowd
Syndicate, its industries should be controlled, not by the
owners and not by the workers, but by those men, whoever
they are, who can control them with the most skill and
efficiency.
The Crowd has come to see that the present owners—
judging from current events, and taking them as a whole,
and speaking impersonally and historically—have proved
themselves, on the whole, incompetent to control industries
with skill and efficiency, because they have treated labour
as the natural "enemy of capital and have quarrelled with it.
It sees that the present workers, acting as syndicates or other-
wise, are incompetent to own and control and manage in-
dustry because they propose to treat capital as the natural
enemy of the workers. There has been but one conclusion
possible. If Civilization or the Crowd Syndicate has a right
to have its industries managed in the interests of all, and if [320]
the present owners have proved themselves to be mentally
incompetent to control industry because they fight labour,
and if the present labourers as a class have proved themselves
to be mentally incompetent because they propose to fight
capital, there is naturally but one question the crowd syndi-
cate is asking to-day, namely, "Are there any mentally com-
petent business firms at all in the world, any firms whose owners
and labourers have thought out a way of not fighting?" From
the point of view of the Crowd, the men who are competent,
who know how to do their work, do not have to lay down
their tools and find out all over again how to do their work.
They know it and keep doing it.
So the Crowd keeps coming back with the question, "Are
there or are there not any competent business establishments
in our modern life? Which are they, and where are they?"
We want to know about them. We want to study them.
We want to focus the thought of the world on them and see
how they do it.
The answering of this question is what the next Pierpont
Morgan and the next Tom Mann are for.
What the next Pierpont Morgan is for is to find out for
us who the competent employers are—the employers who
can get twice as much work out of their labour as other em-
ployers do—recognize them, stand by them and put up money
on them. The next Pierpont Morgan will find out also who
the incompetent employers are, recognize them, stand out
against them, and unless they have brains enough or can
get brains enough to cooperate with their own workmen,
refuse to lend money to them.
This would make a banker a statesman, would make bank-
ing a great and creative profession, shaping the destinies of
civilizations, determining with coins back and forth over
a counter the prayers and the songs, the very religions of
nations, and swinging like a pendulum the fate of the world.
The first Pierpont Morgan has made himself, in a necessary [321]
transitional movement, a hero in the business world because
of a certain moral energy there is in him. He has insisted
in expressing his own character in business. He would not
lend money to capitalists fighting capitalists, and in a general
way he has compelled capitalists to cooperate. The new
hero of the business world is going to compel capital not
merely to cooperate with capital, but to cooperate with
labour and with the public. And as Morgan compelled
the railroads of the United States to cooperate with one
another by getting money for those that showed the most
genius for cooperation, and by not getting money for rail-
roads that showed less genius for it, so the next Pierpont
Morgan will throw the weight of his capital at critical times
in favour of companies that show the largest genius for build-
ing the mutual interests of capitalists, employees, and the
public inextricably into one body. He is going to recognize
as a banker that the most permanent, long-headed, practical,
and competent employers are those whose business genius
is essentially social genius, the genius for being human, for
discovering the mutual interests of men, and for making
human machinery work.
There is a great position ahead for this hero when he comes.
And I have seen in my mind to-day thousands of men, young
and old in every business, in every country of the world,
pressing forward to get the place.
It is what the next Tom Mann is for—to find out for the
Trades Unions and for the public who the most competent
workmen are in every line of business, the workmen who
are the least mechanical-minded, who have shown the most
brains in educating and being educated by their employers,
the most power in touching the imaginations of their em-
ployers with their lives and with their work, and in cooperat-
ing with them.
When the next Tom Mann has searched out and found
the workmen in every line of business who are capable [322]
of working with their superiors, and of becoming more and
more like them, he will make known to all other workmen
and to all other Trades Unions who these workmen are, and
how they have managed to do it. He will see that all Trades
Unions are informed, in night-schools and otherwise, how
they have done it. He will see that the principles, motives,
and conditions that these men have employed in making
themselves more like their superiors, in making themselves
more and more fit to take the place of their superiors, in mak-
ing their work a daily, creative, spirited part of a great busi-
ness, are made so familiar to all Trades Unions that the policies
of all our labour organizations everywhere shall change and
shall be infected with a new spirit; and labouring men, instead
of going to their shops the world over, to spend nine hours
a day in fighting the business in which they are engaged,
to spend nine hours a day in trying to get themselves nothing
to do, nine hours a day in getting nobody to want to employ
them, will work the way they would like to work, and the
way they would all work to-morrow morning if they knew
the things about capital and about labour that they have
a right to know, and that only incompetent employers and
incompetent labor leaders year by year have kept them from
knowing.
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