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The Deluge, a novel by David Graham Phillips |
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Chapter 30. Blacklock Opens Fire |
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_ CHAPTER XXX. BLACKLOCK OPENS FIRE For what I proceeded to do, all sorts of motives, from the highest to the basest, have been attributed to me. Here is the truth: I had already pushed the medicine of hard work to its limit. It was as powerless against this new development as water against a drunkard's thirst. I must find some new, some compelling drug--some frenzy of activity that would swallow up my self as the battle makes the soldier forget his toothache. This confession may chagrin many who have believed in me. My enemies will hasten to say: "Aha, his motive was even more selfish and petty than we alleged." But those who look at human nature honestly, and from the inside, will understand how I can concede that a selfish reason moved me to draw my sword, and still can claim a higher motive. In such straits as were mine, some men of my all-or-none temperament debauch themselves; others thresh about blindly, reckless whether they strike innocent or guilty. I did neither. Probably many will recall that long before the "securities" of the reorganized coal combine were issued, I had in my daily letter to investors been preparing the public to give them a fitting reception. A few days after my whole being burst into flames of resentment against Anita, out came the new array of new stocks and bonds. Roebuck and Langdon arranged with the under writers for a "fake" four times over-subscription, indorsed by the two greatest banking houses in the Street. Despite this often-tried and always-good trick, the public refused to buy. I felt I had not been overestimating my power. But I made no move until the "securities" began to go up, and the financial reporters--under the influence where not actually in the pay of the Roebuck-Langdon clique--shouted that, "in spite of the malicious attacks from the gambling element, the new securities are being absorbed by the public at prices approximating their value." Then--But I shall quote my investors' letter the following morning: "At half-past nine yesterday--nine-twenty-eight, to be exact--President Melville, of the National Industrial Bank, loaned six hundred thousand dollars. He loaned it to Bill Van Nest, an ex-gambler and proprietor of pool rooms, now silent partner in Hoe & Wittekind, brokers, on the New York Stock Exchange, and also in Filbert & Jonas, curb brokers. He loaned it to Van Nest without security. "Van Nest used the money yesterday to push up the price of the new coal securities by 'wash sales'--which means, by making false purchases and sales of the stock in order to give the public the impression of eager buying. Van Nest sold to himself and bought from himself 347,060 of the 352,681 shares traded in. "Melville, in addition to being president of one of the largest banks in the world, is a director in no less than seventy-three great industrial enterprises, including railways, telegraph companies, _savings-banks and life-insurance companies_. Bill Van Nest has done time in the Nevada State Penitentiary for horse-stealing." * * * * * That was all. And it was enough--quite enough. I was a national figure, as much so as if I had tried to assassinate the president. Indeed, I had exploded a bomb under a greater than the president--under the chiefs of the real government of the United States, the government that levied daily upon every citizen, and that had state and national and the principal municipal governments in its strong box. I confess I was as much astounded at the effect of my bomb as old Melville must have been. I felt that I had been obscure, as I looked at the newspapers, with Matthew Blacklock appropriating almost the entire front page of each. I was the isolated, the conspicuous figure, standing alone upon the steps of the temple of Mammon, where mankind daily and devoutly comes to offer worship. Not that the newspapers praised me. I recall none that spoke well of me. The nearest approach to praise was the "Blacklock squeals on the Wall Street gang" in one of the sensational penny sheets that strengthen the plutocracy by lying about it. Some of the papers insinuated that I had gone mad; others that I had been bought up by a rival gang to the Roebuck-Langdon clique; still others thought I was simply hunting notoriety. All were inclined to accept as a sufficient denial of my charges Melville's dignified refusal "to notice any attack from a quarter so discredited." As my electric whirled into Wall Street, I saw the crowd in front of the Textile Building, a dozen policemen keeping it in order. I descended amid cheers, and entered my offices through a mob struggling to shake hands with me--and, in my ignorance of mob mind, I was delighted and inspired! Just why a man who knows men, knows how wishy-washy they are as individuals, should be influenced by a demonstration from a mass of them, is hard to understand. But the fact is indisputable. They fooled me then; they could fool me again, in spite of all I have been through. There probably wasn't one in that mob for whose opinion I would have had the slightest respect had he come to me alone; yet as I listened to those shallow cheers and those worthless assurances of "the people are behind you, Blacklock," I felt that I was a man with a mission! Our main office was full, literally full, of newspaper men--reporters from morning papers, from afternoon papers, from out-of-town and foreign papers. I pushed through them, saying as I went: "My letter speaks for me, gentlemen, and will continue to speak for me. I have nothing to say except through it." "But the public--" urged one. "It doesn't interest me," said I, on my guard against the temptation to cant. "I am a banker and investment broker. I am interested only in my customers." And I shut myself in, giving strict orders to Joe that there was to be no talking about me or my campaign. "I don't purpose to let the newspapers make us cheap and notorious," said I. "We must profit by the warning in the fate of all the other fellows who have sprung into notice by attacking these bandits." The first news I got was that Bill Van Nest had disappeared. As soon as the Stock Exchange opened, National Coal became the feature. But, instead of "wash sales," Roebuck, Langdon and Melville were themselves, through various brokers, buying the stocks in large quantities to keep the prices up. My next letter was as brief as my first philippic: "Bill Van Nest is at the Hotel Frankfort, Newark, under the name of Thomas Lowry. He was in telephonic communication with President Melville, of the National Industrial Bank, twice yesterday. "The underwriters of the National Coal Company's new issues, frightened by yesterday's exposure, have compelled Mr. Roebuck, Mr. Mowbray Langdon and Mr. Melville themselves to buy. So, yesterday, those three gentlemen bought with real money, with their own money, large quantities of stocks which are worth less than half what they paid for them. "They will continue to buy these stocks so long as the public holds aloof. They dare not let the prices slump. They hope that this storm will blow over, and that then the investing public will forget and will relieve them of their load." I had added: "But this storm won't blow over. It will become a cyclone." I struck that out. "No prophecy," said I to myself. "Your rule, iron-clad, must be--facts, always facts; only facts." The gambling section of the public took my hint and rushed into the market; the burden of protecting the underwriters was doubled, and more and more of the hoarded loot was disgorged. That must have been a costly day--for, ten minutes after the Stock Exchange closed, Roebuck sent for me. "My compliments to him," said I to his messenger, "but I am too busy. I'll be glad to see him here, however." "You know he dares not come to you," said the messenger, Schilling, president of the National Manufactured Food Company, sometimes called the Poison Trust. "If he did, and it were to get out, there'd be a panic." "Probably," replied I with a shrug. "That's no affair of mine. I'm not responsible for the rotten conditions which these so-called financiers have produced, and I shall not be disturbed by the crash which must come." Schilling gave me a genuine look of mingled pity and admiration. "I suppose you know what you're about," said he, "but I think you're making a mistake." "Thanks, Ned," said I--he had been my head clerk a few years before, and I had got him the chance with Roebuck which he had improved so well. "I'm going to have some fun. Can't live but once." "I know some people," said he significantly, "who would go to _any_ lengths to get an enemy out of the way." He had lived close enough to Roebuck to peer into the black shadows of that satanic mind, and dimly to see the dread shapes that lurked there. "I'm the safest man on Manhattan Island for the present," said I. "You remember Woodrow? I've always believed that he was murdered, and that the pistol they found beside him was a 'plant.'" "You'd kill me yourself, if you got the orders, wouldn't you?" said I good-humoredly. "Not personally," replied he in the same spirit, yet serious, too, at bottom. "Inspector Bradlaugh was telling me, the other night, that there were easily a thousand men in the slums of the East Side who could be hired to kill a man for five hundred dollars." I suppose Schilling, as the directing spirit of a corporation that hid poison by the hogshead in low-priced foods of various kinds, was responsible for hundreds of deaths annually, and for misery of sickness beyond calculation among the poor of the tenements and cheap boarding-houses. Yet a better husband, father and friend never lived. He, personally, wouldn't have harmed a fly; but he was a wholesale poisoner for dividends. Murder for dividends. Poison for dividends. Starve and freeze and maim for dividends. Drive parents to suicide, and sons and daughters to crime and prostitution--for dividends. Not fair competition, in which the stronger and better would survive, but cheating and swindling, lying and pilfering and bribing, so that the honest and the decent go down before the dishonest and the depraved. And the custom of doing these things so "respectable," the applause for "success" so undiscriminating, and men so unthinking in the rush of business activity, that criticism is regarded as a mixture of envy and idealism. And it usually is, I must admit. Schilling lingered. "I hope you won't blame me for lining up against you, Matt," said he. "I don't want to, but I've got to." "Why?" "You know what'd become of me if I didn't." "You might become an honest man and get self-respect," I suggested with friendly satire. "That's all very well for you to say," was his laughing retort. "You've made yourself tight and tidy for the blow. But I've a family, and a damned expensive one, too. And if I didn't stand by this gang, they'd take everything I've got away from me. No, Matt, each of us to his own game. What _is_ your game, anyhow?" "Fun--just fun. Playing the pipe to see the big fellows dance." But he didn't believe it. And no one has believed it--not even my most devoted followers. To this day Joe Ball more than half suspects that my real objective was huge personal gain. That any rich man should do anything except for the purpose of growing richer seems incredible. That any rich man should retain or regain the sympathies and viewpoint of the class from which he sprang, and should become a "traitor" to the class to which he belongs, seems preposterous. I confess I don't fully understand my own case. Who ever does? My "daily letters" had now ceased to be advertisements, had become news, sought by all the newspapers of this country and of the big cities in Great Britain. I could have made a large saving by no longer paying my sixty-odd regular papers for inserting them. But I was looking too far ahead to blunder into that fatal mistake. Instead, I signed a year's contract with each of my papers, they guaranteeing to print my advertisements, I guaranteeing to protect them against loss on libel suits. I organized a dummy news bureau, and through it got contracts with the telegraph companies. Thus insured against the cutting of my communications with the public, I was ready for the real campaign. It began with my "History of the National Coal Company." I need not repeat that famous history here. I need recall only the main points--how I proved that the common stock was actually worth less than two dollars a share, that the bonds were worth less than twenty-five dollars in the hundred, that both stock and bonds were illegal; my detailed recital of the crimes of Roebuck, Melville and Langdon in wrecking mining properties, in wrecking coal railways, in ejecting American labor and substituting helots from eastern Europe; how they had swindled and lied and bribed; how they had twisted the books of the companies, how they were planning to unload the mass of almost worthless securities at high prices, then to get from under the market and let the bonds and stocks drop down to where they could buy them in on terms that would yield them more than two hundred and fifty per cent, on the actual capital invested. Less and dearer coal; lower wages and more ignorant laborers; enormous profits absorbed without mercy into a few pockets. On the day the seventh chapter of this history appeared, the telegraph companies notified me that they would transmit no more of my matter. They feared the consequences in libel suits, explained Moseby, general manager of one of the companies. "But I guarantee to protect you," said I. "I will give bond in any amount you ask." "We can't take the risk, Mr. Blacklock," replied he. The twinkle in his eye told me why, and also that he, like every one else in the country except the clique, was in sympathy with me. My lawyers found an honest judge, and I got an injunction that compelled the companies to transmit under my contracts. I suspended the "History" for one day, and sent out in place of it an account of this attempt to shut me off from the public. "Hereafter," said I, in the last paragraph in my letter, "I shall end each day's chapter with a forecast of what the next day's chapter is to be. If for any reason it fails to appear, the public will know that somebody has been coerced by Roebuck, Melville & Co." _ |
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