Rich Men and Key Men

DECEMBER, 1927

BY SAMUEL STRAUSS

A NEW kind of man has come to the top of the time. He is the man who is going to run this new industrial age of ours. We— that is to say, all of us here in America — are relieved. We had been worried. We had been apprehensive. We were afraid it was the old-fashioned rich men, the money-makers, the profit-takers, who would be in charge. These new men make fortunes as big as, even bigger than, those of the moneymakers, the profit-takers. We do not care about that.

It is a remarkable change. But then, these new men are remarkable.

I

For a long century we struggled against inordinate wealth. We fought the money power, swollen fortunes, the trusts, big business. And yet all the while, despite everything that we could do to control them, the accumulations of wealth grew more and more immoderate. No matter how many seeming victories we gained over this hydra-headed monster, no matter how joyously the bonfires burned on election night, no matter what sweeping decisions the people gained in the courts, still, when we came to cast up the accounts at the end of each decade, we found trusts more solidly entrenched than before, big business bigger, great fortunes greater. Toward the end of our struggle, despair took hold upon us. Laws, eternal vigilance, all the prescriptions of the Founders for keeping wealth within bounds, had failed us. Where the grandfathers had fought to hold off democracy’s traditional enemies, the grandchildren already saw plutocrats in the ascendant; where the former had cried out lustily against corruption and bribery, the latter gathered close together and sang martial hymns out of the hymnal. Toward the end we could not have said whether it was to preserve our liberty that we were fighting riches, or to prevent Wall Street and monopoly and ‘the malefactors of great, wealth’ from gouging us. We were struggling blindly, with the desperation of those who feel themselves surrounded; we had come to believe our very existence in danger.

And then what happened? How did the struggle issue? How did the fight come out? That was all only a little while ago; where do we stand to-day? To-day our children are coming home from school proud to recite for us the names of America’s billion-dollar companies. Our great fortunes of twentyfive years past struck us with terror; to-day fortunes that are many times larger give us not the least apprehension. Not even so long as twenty-five years ago the people were cheering a conservative Senator who was reported to have said that no man could gain a million dollars and do it honestly; now popular lecturers declare a fortune of a thousand millions to have been honorably acquired. Once we found consolation in the rule that it was only three generations from shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves; now we are comforted with the knowledge that companies have become so large and powerful that they cannot go to pieces. Only a few years ago we were ready to cry ‘ Amen! ’ to the prophets who came saying, ‘Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field’; to-day we ask whether the country would not be better off if there were more large farms and not so many little ones, not so many little coal mines, not so many separate railroads. Once a corporation official, or any very rich man, was not to be thought of for public office; to-day some of us mention as our choice for President this or that rich head of a great company and are surprised that anybody should wonder.

Some day the annalists are going to write a chapter to explain what happened between yesterday and to-day to cause the amazing reversal in our attitude toward great wealth, and it will be one of the most interesting and illuminating expositions in our history book, we may be sure of that. It is too early to write this explanatory chapter now, write it as the historian must write it. But it is not too early to see what the gist of it will be, to catch the drift and emphasis of it.

II

It will not be a difficult chapter. But it will be a long and full one. It will commence with the coming together of democracy and machinery in a virgin land flowing with milk and honey. Never before had there been such a juncture as this. That there must result from it enough to go around went without saying; at least as much as sufficient, as much as would satisfy — that was taken for granted. This was not to say that an equal share for everybody must result — America never entertained that particular notion; we were born not only into the age of freedom, but into the age of capitalism as well. Out of the extraordinary combination of our virgin acres with freedom and machinery we expected to flow, not the same for all, but enough for all, enough for the poor as well as for the rich, enough for the poor to be as independent as the rich, enough to go around.

Was that all we expected? Enough to go around? Two or three times before in this world there had been enough to go around. And what had we here in America? Merely a repetition of those conditions under which sufficiency had previously occurred? No, we had something additional which made our circumstance unparalleled. We had machinery. That was new in the world. That had never happened before. That was bound to make a power of difference, and we sensed it. We sensed that we here in this New World had something to look forward to that no other people of any other time ever had — we sensed it only; we could not have framed in words what it was we expected, but in the very air we breathed we took it in, the import of it shaped and colored all our feelings and inclinations.

We waited watchfully for this unparalleled dispensation from the American circumstance. We strained our gaze confidently to the horizon. But the expectation did not materialize; we began to experience a feeling of disappointment. The fields, the mines, the forests, had commenced to pour out their rich gifts; the wheels of the machines had begun to turn. In terms of food and clothing and shelter we were doing well enough. But the well-being did not give us satisfaction. We were uneasy. Something did not seem right. We had enough to eat and drink, and a good bed to sleep in, but had not the subjects of King Solomon as much? Palestine had been only a land flowing with milk and honey; America was a land flowing with milk and honey to which machinery had been added. Plainly something was not going according to schedule; something was missing; the new dispensation was overdue.

What was the matter? There was patently nothing wrong with the mechanicals of the circumstance. Invention was treading on the heels of invention, more powerful machines were crowding into the places of less powerful, electricity had followed steam — every child knows that triumphant progression. Whatever was wrong must be on the human side. We had a feeling the trouble lay with our rich men.

Did we know just what that trouble was? No. We had the political fear of riches and rich men which is inherent in the democratic idea; the fear, not of moderate, but of immoderate inequalities of property; the fear of wealth’s power to corrupt the electorate, tempt the legislatures, bribe the courts, subsidize the newspapers. We had in addition the economic fear that grew out of the simple pot-of-gold notion; there was just so much wealth for the lot of us, rich and poor, and unless we fought for it the rich would contrive to get not only their own share of the pot but our share too.

But we stopped fighting the rich men. We abandoned our opposition to the great accumulations of wealth. Without making any explanations, without giving any reasons, with no expressions of chagrin or surprise or apology, we executed a volte-face; we laid down our weapons; we quit. Why did we do it? Something must have occurred; what was it? Was it that we had concluded we were helpless? Had we decided to be good sports and give in? Or was it that we had come to a better sense of the value, to us, of other men’s great wealth, that we had been educated, that we had ceased to be ‘economic illiterates’? Or was it our prosperity, the economic revolution, the new and wide distribution of property, the fact that millions of us had ourselves become bondholders and shareholders, owners of bank books, holders of insurance policies — had this altered our outlook on wealth? Or had the rich man himself altered — had the leopard changed his spots? Had the trend toward ‘ better business ’ satisfied us, the adoption of codes of business ethics, the substitution of ‘the public be pleased’ for ‘the public be damned,’ removed our apprehensions?

All these account for some things. But they do not make clear the main thing; they are not enough to explain the astonishing change in our behavior toward riches and rich men. For how prodigious a change it is! Think of it. No other people in any other age had ever feared the rich as we here in America had come to fear them at the end of the last century, and no other people in all of history has ever been less worried over them than are we only a short quarter of a century later.

And yet we have not changed our minds about the talents or habits or the nature of the money-makers — not at all. It is not that we find ourselves mistaken in our estimate of them. We have discovered nothing in them now that we did not know before; we do not see their peculiar qualities now in any different light from that in which we saw them a generation ago, or, for that matter, in any different light from that in which all generations have seen them, in which Isaiah and the son of Sirach saw them in their time.

We see the money-makers the same as we did. But we do not see them in the same place we had been seeing them. We made a mistake as to the place they were to occupy. We discovered that the money-makers were not to be in the dominant position from which, in our baffled state of mind, we had felt ourselves helpless to keep them. They were not to occupy the new seat of command — this was the substance of the revelation which came to cut through our fears as easily and definitely as the knife cuts through the knot.

It had seemed to us inevitable that the money-maker hold this new place of command in our progress. Events, inventions, the ever faster turning of the machinery, the emphasis on prosperity, the decline of agriculture, the growth of cities, the changing outlook of the nation, the course of education and politics, the altered position of the Church, of the State itself—all combined to inform us that a strange kind of life was developing here in America. For want of a better name we called it the ‘industrial life’; the age that was opening we called the ‘Industrial Age.’ We did not know what an industrial age was; there never had been one, but we could see that manufacturing and distributing, buying and selling, were to be chief functions in it. Who could be the men to show us the way in such an age? Who could perform the offices in it? Who were fitted to this new job? Not the churchmen — that was obvious. Not the military men — that was of all things certain. Not the political men, though there were some who for a time tried to make themselves and the rest of us believe it.

The process of exclusion led relentlessly to the money-maker. What other man existed whose talents ran to manufacturing and distributing, to buying and selling, profiting and saving? Only the money-maker — it seemed mercilessly plain, yet we struggled to resist the recognition of it.

Our resistance was in itself full of meaning. The true guides in any age are welcomed by the people, acclaimed by them; the dominant men in any time automatically inspire the trust and confidence of the time, not its fear and hatred and resentment. It seems as if some prophet in the generation that is just past might have seen this, might have put two and two together and foretold what was in the wind. But no prophet did.

And so the new men who began to make their appearance among us came all unheralded. They took us by surprise. For they were a sort of men who never had got their heads above the water of events, had never been called into action by the needs of any previous time, had never corresponded to any time that is known to us. They corresponded exactly to our time. They were the key men of our age. They were the men fitted for the new job. They were the men designed to fill the places we had feared must be occupied by the money-makers. They had scarcely begun to act before we felt their significance.

And so soon as we did, almost overnight our whole outlook changed and our behavior with it. We were no longer afraid. We were no longer resentful. The frightening moneymakers receded into the hinterland of our calculations. They were still in the orchestra, but they were to play only second fiddle. They were not to announce the theme. The curtain had lifted now on the play itself, and we realized that what we had been witnessing was only prologue; we realized that the money-makers were not, as we had thought, destined to play the chief parts — they were to fill the minor rôles only, hold the stage until the leading actors came on.

These latter had never had the first parts since the stage was set for civilization. Why do they have them now? Why are they the key men of the time? They are the key men because they are the dominant men of industry and industry is the key establishment of our time. In this new age of ours it is not religion, it is not politics, it is not the military establishment, which gives the shape to our whole society. It is industry. The needs of industry have become the mould for our politics and our pieties; the aims of industry color our education and our ethics, dictate our books and our buildings — it is thus that the dominant men of industry have become the key men of the age.

I shall try to show how the temperaments of these new men design them for the dominance in our industry. To this end let me talk a little about the new leisure. The most deep-reaching of the changes in our life flow from industry’s need of our leisure.

III

For what reason, through the ages, have men been given rest from work? They have been given rest in order that they might come back refreshed to do more work. ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou cat bread.’ The more sweat, the more bread. The more work and the less rest, the more goods to use. These rules have held from the very beginning until just yesterday. These laws have governed throughout all the ages of scarcity; they have obtained during all this time that there was not enough to go around. America was destined to make the first change in the laws. Amalthæa’s horn fitted with electric motors, a power plant installed in the cornucopia, machinery set up in a land of milk and honey — the result was bound to be profusion, more than enough to go around. New conditions teach new laws; there are bound to be new rules to fit the new condition of more than enough to go around.

In the profusion circumstance, work is no longer the chief necessity. Leisure becomes a necessity, too, a necessity that is at least coordinate with work. Leisure is no longer important just in terms of work. It is important on its own account. To-day there are two pillars to industry where yesterday there was but one; one pillar is still the worker’s work, the other is the worker’s leisure.

No matter what our workers think to get with their eight-hour day, their seven-hour day, whether it be time for physical recreation, whether they want mere negative escape from the grind of machinery or opportunity for reading and general culture — whatever the conscious aims, we can be sure of one thing their leisure is to bring. There is no longer any question what is the purpose that will be served when they have succeeded in setting the Creator an example and resting from their labors on two days out of the seven instead of only one. The five-day worker will have two full days in which to use the goods he has been making, to wear out his automobile, to use up tires and gas, making place for more automobiles, tires, and gas, and all those other things, vegetable and mineral, which industry must keep on turning out, which must be taken away from the mouth of the machine if the energy stored there is not to be dammed up and an explosion to follow. We can no longer spare the spare time. Leisure efficiency is to be as important as labor efficiency— there can be no doubt of that.

The money-maker could operate labor efficiency. It is impossible for him to operate leisure efficiency. The money-maker’s talents matched the scarcity circumstance. He knew how to function usefully, even if ignobly, in the periods when work was the thing to which an employer kept his eye ever single. An economic age in which leisure is an asset is as different from an economic age in which leisure is a liability as politics is different from navigation. The talents to the front of industry when the highest prosperity is conditioned on the most possible work to be got out of men are not the talents to show the way when the highest prosperity depends on the most possible leisure to be allowed men.

How the money-makers have resisted the leisure movement ! They had to resist it; according to their make-up, they could not help but fight it. It ran against the very grain of their nature. For consider what they made its meaning out to be. It showed, they cried, that workers no longer had any interest in the job: they watched the clock, they were growing lazy, irresponsible, shiftless; they purposed a tyranny through sabotage — what was the world coming to! But could the moneymakers turn their temperaments upside down, inside out? Oh yes, they could reconcile themselves to the new situation— to any situation. That has ever been the money-maker’s talent — his ability to adjust himself to the time’s changing demands.

But the key men of a period are not those who adjust themselves; they are adjusted to the period by their very nature. Reconciled to the movement for leisure? To these new men I am describing, leisure appears so right and natural that they are not conscious of it. any more than a fish is conscious of the water or a bird of the air. The parts in them are geared to this driving force of the Industrial Age. They could not function at all — indeed, they did not function at all — in any other age. They were born with the leisure sense, the profusion sense, the new industrial sense. It will never bother them that workers watch the clock, for when the hand marks the end of the production day it is also pointing to the beginning of the consumption day. It will not fret them if men come to work only four hours and rest twelve hours out of the day, if four-twelve be the combination which opens the door of the profusion chest.

Already enough of these key men of the new time are scattered here and there through industry, in manufacturing, in the engineering fields, in the new forms of retail trade, in the public utilities — not so many of them outstanding yet, but still enough of them for us to recognize the breed. It will help us to see them if we can clear out of the way one thing that has particularly obstructed our view. That is their wealth.

For they are ‘successful’ men even as the money-makers are successful men. These key men of our time have sometimes even more income to report than our money-makers; more income to report, and sometimes more losses to report, too. In short, from the point of view of the income-tax collector, there is nothing to distinguish the key men from the money-makers. But dominant men have nearly always been wealthy men. Augustus possessed an enormous fortune; Sixtus was an unparalleled success in filling his treasury; Charlemagne had immense properties. Yet none of these was a money-maker, none was what we should call a man of the acquisitive talent. Nobody would have confused these dominant men with the merely rich men of their times — nobody would have confused Augustus with Trimalchio. There was nothing to associate the kings and the merchant princes together in anybody’s mind. If for no other reason, they were employed in widely different places. Kings were in tire castles, or priests were in the churches, or generals were on the field of battle, while money-makers were in the market place. Kings wore crowns, or priests mitres, or soldiers swords, whereas rich men wore business clothes. The latter could be told apart from the others as easily as, on the chessboard, knight and bishop can be separated from pawns. But in our modern time the key men and the money-makers both alike are to be found in the market place; both alike wear business clothes; in their ordinary comings and goings one resembles the other as, among the chessmen, the pawns resemble each other.

Yet despite their agreements, which, for the purposes of this piece, may be called accidental, the function of our key men is even more different from the function of the money-makers than was the action which is natural to king or priest or warrior different from the action which is natural to a moneymaker. There is even more difference between the outlook of our key men and that of the money-makers than between the outlook of moneymakers and that of the dominant men of political, religious, or military ages.

For the kings and popes and great soldiers had this at least in common with the merchants and bankers of their day, as they had it in common with each other: they were all talented for working in the human material, overcoming the inherent difficulties of it. Nature had constructed all of them alike in this, so that when they were called to act it was always to manipulate their fellow men. One of them was gifted for building states out of men, another for building churches out of men, still another for building armies out of men — out of men with their various hopes and fears, their needs and desires, their appetites and prejudices, apathies and ambitions. The money-maker’s talent was for building fortunes out of men. All, the dominant talents no less than the moneymakers, saw man in the centre of life, saw the social institution to consist first of all of souls, of minds, of individuals, of men and women and children, of fathers and mothers, sons and daughters.

But the new kind of man, our key man, opens his strange eyes and sees another order of world altogether. Men and women are in it, more of them than ever the kings saw, or the churchmen, or the military men. For in the new man’s eyes there is no one, man, woman, or child, who is not a potential unit in the new universe; no matter of what country, faith, or color, all count equally — the brave and the cowards, the weak and the strong, the believers and the unbelievers, the patriots and the scorners, those who can pass the intelligence tests and those who cannot. But although the numbers of human beings that he sees are infinitely larger, his perception of them is much less vivid; they take up a much less important place in his mental view. People are not in the foreground for him; they compose a nebulous design in the background. The new man sees the human creatures in the world, sees them even as the sands upon the seashore, in multitude, but it is not they that touch his imagination; it is not they that inspire him; it is not people that move him to action; by and in themselves, they leave him cold. In his scheme they count, not as individual souls, workable material, but only as a great mass of physical items, receptive units, whose common denominator is no higher than the atom.

But this does not mean that he turns back in the book of civilization to the first difficult chapters and begins to write over again what was set down there. This is not history repeating itself; this is history that never before was written.

This man does not see himself a lord over multitudes of willing serfs; he does not see people as slaves bought and sold. He is not obsessed with any notions of responsibility to his fellow men, either; he does not believe himself to be a trustee for them; he is no philanthropist, no reformer— nothing of this familiar sort. For to the key man the centre of life is not men, but that which in itself has no life. The world he looks upon is not anthropocentric. Men and women are not at the middle of it.

IV

The new kind of man sees, not human beings, but things at the centre of life. He is the prophet of things. He is at home among things. He is in his element among things. He hears the voices of things and can tell what they are saying. His talents force him into the service of things. When he acts, there are happenings among things. To lead things, to rule them, to guide them, to show things the way — this is the principle of his existence. To set things free, to liberate them from their age-old prisons — this is his passion, this is his genius. But things have been here always. Where has the prophet of things been all this time? Why does he only now forge to the front?

The machine was his opportunity. The machine was the signal that the new man’s hour had come. It was the machine summoned him. The machine was fire stolen from Heaven to animate things. Now at last things, which through all the ages, slaves of inexorable time, had lain bound in the deep dungeons of earth, had been chained in lonely forests, had been entombed in the seas, confined in the atmosphere, could be set free. The machine would break the shackles of things. Ore from the mines, wood from the forests, sand and clay from the pits, stone from the quarries — machines would give them wings, would change them as by magic into bathtubs and oil burners, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, houses and theatres, railroads and airplanes. Educalion was the condition of the freedom of man; as education was to the freedom of man, so was machinery to the freedom of things. But things could not be free unless men were free to receive them, to use them. And that is where leisure comes in. Machinery and leisure, each was useless without the other. The new man did not bring this leisure to men. He was not the prophet of leisure, but he was the priest of leisure.

The money-maker had seen machinery as his ally. It would help him in his function of exploiting men. Machinery would multiply the goods he had to sell. How dispose of those goods then? The money-maker responded to high-power production by putting the emphasis of his energies on high-power salesmanship, on organized persuasion, on service. The new man, on the other hand, sees machinery as the instrument of things; the emphasis of his energies is thus upon efficiency, standardization, mass production, mass distribution. High-power salesmanship, service, you see, was the response of the temperament which fulfills itself by exploiting men. The response of the temperament which fulfills itself by exploiting things was standardization, mass production. The moneymaker saw the multiplying power of the machine, saw the extra product pouring out of the mouth of machinery, and immediately he turned to the people, immediately he increased his efforts to manipulate them, to enlarge the field of their wants, to convert more of their luxuries into necessities, to work upon their vanities, to play upon their fears — in short, to make them buy the goods. But when the new man came upon the scene, when he saw the multiplying power of the machine, he saw just that and nothing else. This is how the lenses of his eyes were ground. He gave his whole attention to the things to be produced. He did not turn about and give a part of his thought to the men who were to buy the things. His business was to set things free; he did that, and the things did the rest; he standardized, he manufactured in mass, he retailed in mass — he dumped the goods down in big heaps of small parcels for the people to take away. He made it possible for things to bring into operation their own laws, to make their own way in the world; he left it for the things to do the work.

Naturally our fear of great wealth left us. Spontaneously our distrust of rich men dissolved. We saw that it was not the money-makers who were to be the key men. We saw now that the power of machinery was not to be used to exploit us. It was not the money-makers who were to point the direction for the new time. We saw that those who were to point the direction had no designs upon our liberty; their eyes were not on our pockets; they had no interest in ‘taking the bread out of our children’s mouths,’ in ‘enslaving us.’ For that matter they had no interest in keeping us free, either, except as we must be free to consume goods. Their business, their aims, ambitions, purposes, passions, their function — all were in terms of things, all were centred in things. Their interest was in things and not in us. Their power was over things and not over us.

V

Is it good? Is it bad? Where will it end? What kind of future is this we are looking into now? Men whose interest it is to release things — must not the resulting profusion defeat itself, overleap its banks, drown everything— freedom, opportunity, law, order, justice, even profusion itself?

Some people fear this. Perhaps they are right. Let us hope not.