Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
President Grant. The matter was handled with great delicacy in the case
of the latter--“the glorious honest man,” the banker called him. “He
sent a fishing-rod and creel to the President’s little son Jesse, for
which he was duly thanked in a childish hand.” He invited the General
to a day’s fishing-trip, and together the heroes whipped the trout
stream in the most charming comradeship. “It may be thought,” remarks
his biographer, “that such machinations were unbecoming in a man of
Mr. Cooke’s moral dimensions.”[516] But surely delicate “machinations”
were not unbecoming to such “moral dimensions.” “We let the other
side do most of the talking,” wrote the deacon-like Henry Cooke, who
kept the Sabbath as strictly as his brother, “and we do the voting.”
The President’s cabinet was bitterly divided on the issue, but wheels
turn on well-greased axles and delicate attentions have their reward.
The bill was signed and the building of the Northwest empire could go
forward.
Unfortunately, however, black days were pressing hard on the great
success. The money of the company ran in fructifying streams
through Europe and America but the expected crop was short. Thirty
papers were subsidized in Germany; agents lived in ducal palaces;
commissions, stocks, bonuses, were plowed in for manure; but the crop
of bond-sales was still scanty. Ugly rumors were abroad. There was talk
of a congressional investigation, and when General Banks offered a
resolution of inquiry Jay Cooke was hurt to the quick. An investigation
he regarded as no other than persecution of legitimate business, and he
wrote to his brother: “He ought to be expelled from Congress for such
outrageous attacks upon the great interests of the country.... If I
get at him I will give him a piece of my mind, and no mistake, for his
impertinence and foolishness.”[517] Then the _Crédit Mobilier_ scandal
broke and in a panic he wrote to Henry Cooke denouncing the proposal to
stop payment on the interest-coupons of the Union Pacific.
Now I want you to go to the Attorney General at once and tell him
how wrong this whole procedure is. This whole persecution of the
Union Pacific is nonsense, and is damaging our credit abroad.
If the government sets the example of enjoining the payment of
interest coupons, who will buy a bond abroad? The whole thing
is wrong, ill advised and scandalous.... Williams ought to make
a public apology for such an attack and instruct the lawyers to
desist from anything of the kind. The bonds are long since in the
hands of innocent holders, and, if they were not, they could never
reach them in this way. Some wily speculators have put the idea
into the heads of the government lawyers and they, without knowing
anything of its effect upon business, have made this attack. It
will damage us hundreds of millions unless withdrawn at once. No
man of sense would buy a railroad bond or anything else in this
country if such legal proceedings are to be permitted under the
sanction of the highest officer of the government.[518]
Jay Cooke’s ethics were simple. Whatever helped bond-sales was
patriotic and right; whatever hurt them was wicked and immoral. Let
government take care of business and business will take care of the
country. That the newspapers could not see this great truth, but often
indulged in wild demagoguery, was painful to one who had been generous
to them. “It is too bad,” he wrote of a certain attack, “that these
newspapers are permitted by the law thus to interfere with great public
works.”[519] But the black days were at hand. The _Crédit Mobilier_
scandal was a whirlwind reaped from the sowings of the Gilded Age. With
the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war bond-sales stopped short in
Europe and the firm of Jay Cooke and Company was broken. September 18,
1873, the New York house suspended payment; the house of cards tumbled
to pieces; and a panic swept the country. The crash was as spectacular
as the rise; it had been built on credit and when credit was shaken it
fell.
Because he had amassed a great fortune Jay Cooke was regarded by his
fellow Americans as an intelligent man whose opinions were entitled
to heedful consideration. A national figure in finance must become a
national figure in the public councils; and this added function he
assumed with the utmost seriousness. As the power behind the United
States Treasury he regarded himself as responsible for the program
of the Treasury; and he made use of his immense publicity-machine to
shape public opinion in regard to taxation, funding, and the currency.
His “views” of those questions were as simple as a child’s primer. In
brief they were: no taxes for the extinction of the debt; consolidate
the debt and fund it in a form attractive to capital; retire the
greenbacks and return at once to specie payments. Like others who
had made money out of the war he did not take kindly to the idea of
returning a part of it in taxes to pay off a debt that was highly
profitable to him as a broker and banker. The men of ’65 had fought and
suffered to secure the blessings of liberty to their posterity, and it
was only fair that posterity should help pay the bills. To popularize
this pregnant thought he subsidized a pamphlet contributed by one of
his hack-writers, entitled _Our National Debt a National Blessing_;
but the Hamiltonian argument overshot the mark and aroused bitter
opposition. In this as in his attitude towards currency-contraction
and funding he was thinking exclusively in terms of the money-lender.
Very likely he was probably not so much self-seeking as ignorant.
Intellectually he was poverty-stricken and outside the narrow realm of
brokerage and banking he was only a child. He read nothing, thought
little and was unconcerned with social or economic principles. His
business life was regulated by a set of ready-made formulas, in which
ideas played no part. William Cullen Bryant rightly judged him in the
following comment:
We counsel Mr. Jay Cooke in all good will, not to abandon his
proper vocation of dealing in stocks and government securities, for
the sake of giving lectures on political economy--a subject which
he does not understand. We do not say that he might not understand
it if he had given it his attention, but that he has evidently
never done, and knows no more of the matter than Red Jacket knew of
Greek. We advise all who have any money to invest to take Mr. Jay
Cooke’s seven-thirty bonds, and eschew his political economy. His
seven-thirties are first rate, his political economy is a tissue of
mistakes.[520]
Any program that lay outside the bounds of his formulas he regarded
as dangerous radicalism, and any policy that threatened to reduce his
commissions he regarded as unchristian. He bitterly disliked Secretary
Boutwell of the Treasury, who rejected his guidance, and he wrote to
his brother:
I observe ... that Boutwell is to leave the Treasury. I think that
if he does not propose to do any better than he has in the past it
will be a grand move for Grant to put some more practical person in
his place. A man who has no more breadth of thought ... and no more
spunk than to let the country drift along without even an attempt
at funding the debt, and who insists upon keeping up an enormous
taxation for the foolish object of paying off rapidly a debt that
no one wants paid off, excepting gradually, it will be a great
benefit to have replaced by some one who will take an opposite
course.[521]
A month later one of the causes of the hostility was suggested by a
member of the firm:
All of our transactions with Boutwell have shown conclusively that
he will never permit one dollar to be made out of the business of
the Treasury, if he can possibly prevent it. With all his friendly
feelings I cannot remember a single dollar that we have made
directly or indirectly out of his administration of the Treasury,
...[522]
Against the Greenback movement his hostility was bitter. He regarded
it as an attempt to repudiate the “plighted faith” of the nation, and
in 1867 he issued a pamphlet, written to order, aimed at combating
the movement. In the opinion of a subsidized admirer it was “able,
unanswerable and timely,” calculated to do immense good in a country
where universal suffrage encourages the “attempts of demagogues to
excite the poor against the rich, labor against capital, and all
who haven’t money against the banks who have it.”[523] How deeply
the members of the firm felt in presence of any threat to the money
interests is suggested in a letter from Henry Cooke of October 12, 1867.
You know how I have felt for a long time past in regard to the
course of the ultra infidelic radicals like Wade, Sumner, Stevens,
_et id omne genus_. They were dragging the Republican party into
all sorts of isms and extremes. Their policy was one of bitterness,
hate, and wild agrarianism without a single Christian principle to
give it consistency, except the sole idea of universal suffrage....
These reckless demagogues have had their day and the time has come
for wiser counsels. With Wade uttering agrarian doctrines in Kansas
and fanning the flame of vulgar prejudices, trying to array labor
against capital and pandering to the basest passions; with Butler
urging wholesale conscription throughout the South and wholesale
repudiation throughout the North so far as the national debt is
concerned; with Stevens joining hands with the traitor Vallandigham
and advocating the idea of a flood of irredeemable paper money
sufficient in volume to drown the whole country; with Pomeroy and
Wade and Sprague and a host of others clamoring for the unsexing of
woman and putting the ballot in her hand ... what wonder it is that
the accumulated load was too heavy for any party to carry and that
it broke down under it?[524]
There can be little doubt that the spectacular career of Jay Cooke
quite dazzled his contemporary fellow citizens. Nothing like it
had before appeared in America. The greatest salesman that the
rising middle class had yet produced, a financier who understood
the psychology of mass appeal, a propagandist of truly heroic
proportions, he was reckoned no other than a magician by all the lesser
money-grabbers of the Gilded Age. From nothing he built up a vast
fortune. Scrupulous in all religious duties, a kind husband, a generous
friend, benevolent in all worthy charities, simple and democratic
in his tastes, ardently patriotic, uncreative and unintellectual,
he exemplified all the substantial middle-class virtues of a people
newly given to the worship of a sterile money economy. To call him
a vulgarian and the chronicle of his life nauseous would scarcely be
charitable. The record of his days has been laid before us, naked and
mean, by his biographer, who has done his best to construct a hero
from the poor materials. No doubt he was a hero of his generation--and
perhaps of ours also.
3 • Charles A. Dana
If General Grant and Jay Cooke were naïve heroes, ignorant as the
generation that delighted to honor them, Charles A. Dana, the
journalist of the Gilded Age, was a disillusioned intellectual who
after immersing himself in the golden dreams of the forties, put
away all Utopian hopes and made use of his brains to serve himself.
Disappointed with idealism, he turned materialist and dedicated to
capitalistic exploitation the abilities that before had been given to
a venture in coöperative living. A brilliant fellow, playing the new
game in Gilded Age fashion and winning a brilliant success, he was a
conspicuous victim of the bankruptcy of idealism that is the price of
all wars, and his later triumph as editor of the _New York Sun_ only