PART 7:HISTORY OF THE GREAT AMERICAN FORTUNES,

HISTORY OF THE GREAT 

AMERICAN FORTUNES

BY GUSTAVUS MYERS

CHAPTER IX

THE FIELD FORTUNE IN EXTENSO

In close similarity to the start of the Astors and many other founders of great land fortunes, commerce was the original means by which Marshall Field obtained the money which he invested in land.  Consecutively came a ramification of other revenue-producing properties.  Once in motion, the process worked in the same admixed, interconnected way as it did in the amassing of contemporary large fortunes.  It may be literally compared to hundreds of golden streams flowing from as many sources to one central point.  From land, business, railroads, street railways, public utility and industrial corporations — from these and many other channels, prodigious profits kept, and still keep, pouring in ceaselessly.  In turn, these formed ever newer and widening distributing radii of investments.  The process, by its own resistless volition, became one of continuous compound progression.

LAND FOR ALMOST NOTHING.

Long before the business of the firm of Marshall Field & Co. had reached the annual total of $50,000,000, Field, Leiter and their associates had begun buying land in Chicago.  Little capital was needed for the purpose.  The material growth of Chicago explains sufficiently how a few dollars put in land fifty or sixty years ago became in time an automatically-increasing fund of millions.  A century or so ago the log cabin of John Kinzie was the only habitation on a site now occupied by a swarming, conglomerate, rushing population of 1,700,000.1  Where the prairie land once stretched in solitude, a huge, roaring, choking city now stands, black with factories, the habitat of nearly two millions of human beings, living in a whirlpool of excitement and tumult, presenting extremes of wealth and poverty, the many existing in dire straits, the few rolling in sovereign luxury.  A saying prevails in Chicago that the city now holds more millionaires than it did voters in 1840.

Land, in the infancy of the city, was cheap ;  few settlers there were, and the future could not be foreseen.  In 1830 one-quarter of an acre could be bought for $20; a few bits of silver, or any currency whatsoever, would secure to the buyer a deed carrying with it a title forever, with a perpetual right of exclusive ownership and a perpetual hold upon all succeeding generations.  The more population grew, the greater the value their labor gave the land ;  and the keener their need, the more difficult it became for them to get land.

Within ten years , by about the beginning of the year 1840 , the price of a quarter of an acre in the center of the city had risen to $1,500.  A decade later the established value was $17,500, and in 1860, $28,000.  Chicago was growing with great rapidity , a network of railroads converged there ,  mammoth factories, mills, grain elevators, packing houses ,   a vast variety of manufacturing and mercantile concerns set up in business, and brought thither swarms of workingmen and their families, led on by the need of food and the prospects of work.  The greater the influx of workers, the more augmented became the value of land.  Inevitably the greatest congestion of living resulted.[30 years 20 to 28,000,already the corruption had started DC]

By 1870 the price of a quarter of an acre in the heart of the city bounded to $120,000, and by 1880, to $130,000.[Crazy 2 more years up 102,000!!!DC]

IT BECOMES WORTH MILLIONS.

During the next decade — a decade full of bitter distress to the working population of the United States, and marked by widespread suffering — the price shot up to $900,000.  By 1894 — a panic year, in which millions of men were out of work and in a state of appalling destitution — a quarter of an acre reached the gigantic value of $1,250,000.2  At this identical time large numbers of the working class, which had so largely created this value, were begging vainly for work, and were being evicted by the tens of thousands in Chicago because they could not pay rent for their miserable, cramped habitations.

By exchanging a few hundred, or a few thousand dollars, in Chicago’s extreme youth, for a scrap of paper called a deed, the buyer of this land found himself after the lapse of years, a millionaire.  It did not matter where or how he obtained the purchase money , whether he swindled, or stole, or inherited it, or made it honestly , so long as it was not counterfeit, the law was observed.  After he got the land he was under no necessity of doing anything more than hold on to it, which same he could do equally well, whether in Chicago or buried in the depths of Kamschatka.  If he chose, he could get chronically drunk ,  he could gamble, or drone in laziness ;  he could do anything but work.  Nevertheless, the land and all its values which others created, were his forever, to enjoy and dispose of as suited his individual pleasure.

This was, and is still, the system.  Thoroughly riveted in law, it was regarded as a rational, beneficent and everlasting fixture of civilized life — by the beneficiaries.  And as these latter happened to be, by virtue of their possessions, among the real rulers of government, their conceptions and interests were embodied in law, thought and custom as the edict of civilization.  The whole concurrent institutions of society, which were but the echo of property interests, pronounced the system wise and just, and, as a reigning force, do still so proclaim it.  In such a state there was nothing abnormal in any man monopolizing land and exclusively appropriating its revenues.  On the contrary, it was considered a superior stroke of business, a splendid example of astuteness.  Marshall Field was looked upon as a very sagacious business man.

FIELD’S REAL ESTATE TRACTS.

Field bought much land when it was of comparatively inconsequential value, and held on to it with a tenacious grip.  In the last years of his life, his revenues from his real estate were uninterruptedly enormous.

“ Downtown real estate in Chicago,” wrote “ a popular writer ” in a typically effusive biographical account of Field, published in 1901, “ is about as valuable, foot for foot, as that in the best locations in New York City.  From $8,000 to $15,000 a front foot are not uncommon figures for property north of Congress street, in the Chicago business district.  Marshall Field owns not less than twenty choice sites and buildings in this section , not including those used for his drygoods business.  In the vicinity of the Chicago University buildings he owns square block after block of valuable land.  Yet farther south he owns hundreds of acres of land in the Calumet region — land invaluable for manufacturing purposes.”

This extension and centralization of land ownership were accompanied by precisely the same results as were witnessed in other cities, although these results were the sequence of the whole social and industrial system, and not solely of any one phase.  Poverty grew in exact proportion to the growth of large fortunes ;  the one presupposed, and was built upon, the existence of the other.  Chicago became full of slums and fetid, overcrowded districts, and if the density and congestion of population are not as great as in New York, Boston and Cincinnati, it is only because of more favorable geographical conditions.

Field’s fortune was heaped up in about the last twenty years of his life.  The celerity of its progress arose from the prolific variety and nature of his possessions.  To form even an approximate idea of how fast wealth came in to him, it is necessary to picture millions of men, women and children toiling clay after day, year in and year out, getting a little less than two parts of the value of what they produced, while almost nine portions either went to him entirely or in part.  But this was not all.  Add to these millions of workers the rest of the population of the United States who had to buy from, or in some other way pay tribute to, the many corporations in which Field held stock, and you get some adequate conception of the innumerable influxions of gold which poured into Field’s coffers every minute, every second of the day, whether he were awake or asleep ,  whether sick or well, whether traveling or sitting stock still.

HIS INCOME :  $500 TO $700 AN HOUR.

This one man had the legal power of taking over to himself, as his inalienable property, his to enjoy, hoard, squander, bury, or throw in the ocean, if his fancy so dictated, the revenue produced by the labor of millions of beings as human as he, with the same born capacity for eating, drinking, breathing, sleeping and dying.  Many of his workers had a better digestive apparatus which had to put up with inferior food, and, at times, no food at all.  He could eat no more than three meals a day, but his daily income was enough to have afforded him ten thousand sumptuous daily meals, with exquisite “ trimmings,” while periods came when those who drudged for him were fortunate to have any meals at all.  Few of his workers received as much as $2 a day ;  Field’s income was estimated to be at the rate of about $500 to $700 an hour.

First — and of prime importance — was his wholesale and retail drygoods business.  This was, and is, a line of business in which frantic competition survived long after the manufacturing field had passed over into concentrated trust control.  To keep apace with competitors and make high profits, it was imperative not only to resort to shifts, expedients and policies followed by competitors, but to improve upon, and surpass, those methods if possible.  Field at all times proved that it was possible.  No competing firm would pay a certain rate of wages but what Field instantly outgeneraled it by cutting his workers’ wages to a point enabling him to make his goods as cheap or cheaper.

HIS EMPLOYEES’ WRETCHED WAGES.

In his wholesale and retail stores he employed not less than ten thousand men, women and children.  He compelled them to work for wages which, in a large number of cases, were inadequate even for a bare subsistence.  Ninety-five per cent. received $12 a week or less.  The female sewing-machine operators who bent over their tasks the long day, making the clothes sold in the Field stores, were paid the miserable wages of $6.75 a week.  Makers of socks and stockings were paid from $4.57 to $4.75 a week.  The working hours consisted variously of from fifty-nine to fifty-nine and a half a week.  Field also manufactured his own furniture as well as many other articles.  Furniture workers were paid $9.38  Machine workers, $11.02, and upholsterers $12.47 a week.  All of Field’s wage workers were paid by the hour ,  should they fall sick, or work become slack, their pay was proportionately reduced.

The wretchedness in which many of these workers lived, and in which they still live (for the same conditions obtain), was pitiful in the extreme.  Even in a small town where rent is not so high, these paltry wages would have been insufficient for an existence of partial decency.  But in Chicago, with its forbidding rents, the increasing cost of all necessaries, and all of the other expenses incident to life in a large city, their wages were notoriously scanty.

Large numbers of them were driven to herding in foul tenements or evil dwellings, the inducements of which was the rent, a little lighter than could be had elsewhere.  Every cent economized meant much.  If an investigator (as often happened) had observed them, and had followed them to their wretched homes after their day’s work, he would have noted, or learned of, these conditions.  Their food was circumscribed and coarse , the very cheapest forms of meat, and usually stale bread.  Butter was a superfluous luxury.  The morning meal was made up of a chunk of bread washed down with “ coffee ” , adulterated stuff with just a faint odor of real coffee.  At noon, bread and an onion, or a bit of herring, or a slice of cheap cheese composed their dinner, with perhaps a dash of dessert in the shape of sweetened substance, artificially colored, sold as “ cake.”  For supper, cheap pork, or a soup bone, garnished occasionally in the season by stale vegetables, and accompanied by a concoction resembling tea.  Few of these workers ever had more than one suit of clothes, or more than one dress.  They could not afford amusements, and were too fatigued to read or converse.  At night bunches of them bunked together sometimes eight or ten in a single room ,  by this arrangement the rent of each was proportionately reduced.

It is now we come to a sinister result of these methods of exploiting the wage-working girls and women.  The subject is one that cannot be approached with other than considerable hesitancy, not because the facts are untrue, but because its statistical nature has not been officially investigated.  Nevertheless, the facts are known ;  stern, inflexible facts.  For true historical accuracy, as well as for purposes of humanity, they must be given ;  that delicacy would be false, misleading and palliative which would refrain from tearing away the veil and from exposing the putridity beneath.

Field was repeatedly charged with employing his workers at such desperately low wages as to drive large numbers of girls and women, by the terrifying force of poverty, into the alternative of prostitution.  How large the number has been, or precisely what the economic or psychological factors have been, we have no means of knowing.  It is worth noting that many official investigations, futile though their results, have probed into many other phases of capitalist fraud.  But the department stores over the country have been a singular exception.

Why this partiality ?  Because the public is never allowed to get agitated over the methods and practices of the department stores.  Hence the politicians are neither forced, for the sake of appearance, to investigate, nor can they make political capital from a thing over which the people are not aroused.  Not a line of the horrors taking place in the large department stores is ever reported in the newspapers, not a mention of the treatment of girls and women, not a word of the injunctions frequently obtained restraining these stores from continuing to sell this or that brand of spurious goods in imitation of those of some complaining capitalist, or of the seizures by Health Boards of adulterated drugs or foods.

Wherefore this silence ?  Because, unsophisticated reader, these same department stores are the largest and steadiest advertisers.  The newspapers, which solemnly set themselves up as moral, ethical, and political instructors to the public, sell all the space desired to advertise goods many of which are fraudulent in nature or weight.  Not a line objectionable to these department stores ever gets into newspaper print ;  on the contrary, the owners of these stores, by the bludgeon of their immense advertising, have the power, within certain limitations, of virtually acting as censors.  The newspapers, whatever their pretensions, make no attempt to antagonize the powers from whom so large a portion of their revenue comes.  It is a standing rule in newspaper offices in the cities, that not a specific mention of any unfavorable or discreditable matter occurring in department stores, or affecting the interests of the proprietors of those stores, is allowed to get into print.  Thus it is that the general public are studiously kept in ignorance of the abominations incessantly going on in the large department stores.

OUTCASTS RATHER THAN SLAVES.

Notwithstanding this community of silence, in some respects akin to a huge compounded system of blackmail, it is generally known that department stores are often breeding stations of prostitution by reason of two factors — extremely low wages and environment.  There can be no disputing the fact that these two working together, and perhaps superinduced by other compelling influences, do bring about a condition the upshot of which is prostitution.  Such supine reports as those of the Consumers’ League, an organization of well-disposed dilettantes, and of superficial purposes, give no insight into the real estate of affairs.  In his rather sensational and vitriolic raking of Chicago, W.T. Stead strongly deals with the effects of department store conditions in filling the ranks of prostitutes.  He quotes Dora Claflin, the proprietress of a brothel, as saying that such houses as hers obtained their inmates from the stores, those in particular where hours were long and the pay small.3

Mockery of mockeries that in this era of civilization, so-called, a system should prevail that yields far greater returns from selling the body than from honest industry !

It has been estimated that the number of young women who receive $2,500 in one year by the sale of their persons is larger than the number of women of all ages, in all businesses and professions, who make a similar sum by work of mind or hand.4  But one of the most significant recognitions of the responsibility of department stores for the prevalence of prostitution, was the act of a member of the Illinois legislature, a few years ago, in introducing a resolution (which failed to pass) to investigate the department stores of Chicago on the ground that conditions in them led to a shocking state of immorality.  The statement has been repeatedly made that nearly one-half of the outcast girls and women of Chicago have come from the department stores.5

It was not only by these methods that the firm of Marshall Field & Co. was so phenomenally successful in making money.  In the background were other methods which belong to a different category.  Whatever Field’s practices — and they were venal and unscrupulous to a great degree, as will be shown — he was an astute organizer.  He understood how to manipulate and use other men, and how to centralize business, and cut out the waste and junket of mercantile operations.  In the evolutionary scheme of business he played his important part and a very necessary part it was, for which he must be given full credit.  His methods, base as they were, were in no respect different from those of the rest of the commercial world, as a whole.  The only difference was that he was more conspicuous and more successful.

CENTERING ALL PROFITS IN HIMSELF.

At a time when all business was run on the chaotic and desultory lines characteristic of the purely competitive age, he had the foresight and shrewdness to perceive that the storekeeper who depended upon the jobber and the manufacturer for his goods was largely at the mercy of those elements.  Even if he were not, there were two sets of profits between him and the making of the goods — the jobber’s profits and the manufacturer’s.

Years before this vital fact was impressed upon the minds of the floundering retailers, Field understood, and acted upon, it.  He became his own manufacturer and jobber.  Thus he was complacently able to supply his department store with many goods at cost, and pocket the profits that otherwise would have gone to jobber and manufacturer.  In, however, the very act of making three sets of profits, while many other stores made only one set, Field paid his employees at the retail store rate ;  that is to say, he paid no more in wages than the store which had to buy often from the jobber, who in turn, purchased from the manufacturer.  With this salient fact in mind, one begins to get a clear insight into some of the reasons why Field made such enormous profits, and an understanding of the consequent contrast of his firm doing a business of $50,000,000 a year while thousands of his employees had to work for a wretched pittance.  He could have afforded to have paid them many times more than they were getting and still would have made large profits.  But this would have been an imbecilic violation of that established canon of business :  Pay your employees as little as you can, and sell your goods for the highest price you can get.

Field was one of the biggest dry goods manufacturers in the world.  He owned, says a writer, scores of enormous factories in England, Ireland and Scotland.  “ The provinces of France,” this eulogist goes on, “ are dotted with his mills.  The clatter of the Marshall Field looms is heard in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and Russia.  Nor is the Orient neglected by this master of fabrics.  Plodding Chinese and the skilled Japs are numbered by the thousands on the payroll of the Chicago merchant and manufacturer.  On the other side of the equator are vast woolen mills in Australia, and the chain extends to South America, with factories in Brazil and in other of our neighboring republics.”

In all of these factories the labor of men, women and children was harshly exploited ;  in nearly all of them the workers were in an unorganized state, and therefore deprived of every vestige of self-protection.  Boys and girls of tenderest age were mercilessly ground into dollars ;  their young life’s blood dyed deep the fabrics which brought Field riches.  In this dehumanizing business Field was only doing what the entire commercial aristocracy the world over was doing.

How extraordinarily profitable the business of Marshall Field & Co. was (and is), may be seen in the fact that its shares (it became an incorporated stock company) were worth $1,000 each.  At his death Marshall Field owned 3,400 of these shares, which the executors of his estate valued at $3,400,000.  That the exploitation of labor, the sale of sweatshop and adulterated goods, and many other forms of oppression or fraud were a consecutive and integral part of his business methods is undeniable.  But other factors, distinctly under the ban of the law, afford an additional explanation of how he was able to undersell petty competitors, situated even at a distance.  What all of these factors were is not a matter of public knowledge.  At least one of them came to light when, on December 4, 1907, D.R. Anthony, a representative in Congress from Kansas, supplied evidence to Postmaster-General Meyer that the house of Marshall Field & Co. had enjoyed, and still had, the privilege of secret discriminatory express rates in the shipment of goods.  This charge, if sustained, was a clear violation of the law ;  but these violations by the great propertied interests were common, and entailed, at the worst, no other penalty than a nominal fine.

From such sources came the money with which he became a large landowner.  Also, from the sources enumerated, came the money with which he and his associates debauched politics, and bribed common councils and legislatures to present them with public franchises for street and elevated railways, gas, telephone and electric light projects — franchises intrinsically worth incalculable sums.6  With the money squeezed out of his legions of poverty-stricken employees and out of his rent-racked tenants he became an industrial monarch.  The inventory of his estates filed in court by his executors revealed that he owned stocks and bonds in about one hundred and fifty corporations.  This itemized list showed that he owned many millions of bonds and stocks in railroads with the construction and operation of which he had nothing to do.  The history of practically all of them reeks with thefts of public and private money ,  corruption of common councils, of legislatures, Congress and of administrative officials ,  land grabbing, fraud, illegal transactions, violence, and oppression not only of their immediate workers, but of the entire population.7  He owned ,to give a few instances , $1,500,000 of Baltimore and Ohio stock ,  $600,000 of Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe ,  $1,860,000 of Chicago and Northwestern, and tens of millions more of the stock or bonds of about fifteen other railroads.

He also owned an immense assortment of the stocks of a large number of trusts.  The affairs of these trusts have been shown in court, at some time or other, as overflowing with fraud, the most glaring oppressions, and violations of law.  He had $450,000 in stock of the Corn Products Company (the Glucose Trust) , $370,000 of the stock of the notorious Harvester Trust, which charges the farmer, $75 for a machine that perhaps costs $16 in all to make and market, and which holds a great part of the farming population bound hand and foot , $350,000 of Biscuit Trust stock , $200,000 of American Tin Can Company (Tin Can Trust) stock ,  and large amounts of stock in other trusts.  All of these stocks and bonds Field owned outright ,  he made it a rule never to buy a share of stock on margin or for speculative purposes.  All told, he owned more than $55,000,000 in stocks and bonds.

A very considerable part of these were securities of Chicago surface and elevated railway, gas, electric light and telephone companies.  In the corruption attending the securing of the franchises of these corporations he was a direct principal.  The narrative of this part of his fortune, however, more pertinently belongs to subsequent chapters of this work.

CHAPTER X

FURTHER VISTAS OF THE FIELD FORTUNE

But if only to give at the outset a translucent example of Field’s methods in the management of industrial corporations, it is well to advert here to the operations of one of his many properties — the Pullman Company, otherwise called the “ Palace Car Trust.”  This is a necessary part of the exposition in order to bring out more of the methods by which Field was enabled to fling together his vast fortune.

The artificial creation of the law called the corporation was so devised that it was comparatively easy for the men who controlled it to evade personal, moral, and often legal, responsibility for their acts.  Governed as the corporation was by a body of directors, those acts became collective and not individual ,  if one of the directors were assailed he could plausibly take refuge in the claim that he was merely one of a number of controllers ,  that he could not be held specifically responsible.  Thus the culpability was shifted, until it rested on the corporation, which was a bloodless thing, not a person.

FIELD’S PULLMAN WORKS.

In the case of the Pullman Co., however, much of the moral responsibility could be directly placed upon Field, inasmuch as he, although under cover, was virtually the dictator of that corporation.  According to the inventory of the executors of his will, he owned 8,000 shares of Pullman stock, valued at $800,000.  It was asserted (in 1901) that Field was the largest owner of Pullman stock.  “ In the popular mind,” wrote a puffer, probably inspired by Field himself, “ George M. Pullman has ever been deemed the dominant factor in that vast and profitable enterprise.”  This belief was declared an error, and the writer went on ,  “ Field is, and for years has been, in almost absolute control.  Pullman was little more than a figurehead.  Such men as Robert T. Lincoln, the president of the company, and Norman B. Ream are but representatives of Marshall Field, whose name has never been identified with the property he so largely owns and controls.”  That fulsome writer, with the usual inaccuracies and turgid exaggerations of “ popular writers,” omitted to say that although Field was long the controlling figure in the management of the Pullman works, yet other powerful American multimillionaires, such as the Vanderbilts, had also become large stockholders.

The Pullman Company, Moody states, employed in 1904, in all departments of its various factories at different places, nearly 20,000 employees, and controlled 85 per cent of the entire industry.1  As at least a part of the methods of the company have been the subject of official investigation, certain facts are available.

To give a brief survey, the Pullman Company was organized in 1867 to build sleeping cars of a feasible type officially patented by Pullman.  In 1880 it bought five hundred acres of land near Chicago.  Upon three hundred of these it built its plant, and proceeded, with much show and advertisement of benevolence, to build what is called a model town for the benefit of its workers.  Brick tenements, churches, a library, and athletic grounds were the main features, with sundry miscellaneous accessories.  This project was heralded far and wide as a notable achievement, a conspicuous example of the growing altruism of business.

THE NATURE OF A MODEL TOWN.

Time soon revealed the inner nature of the enterprise.  The “model town,” as was the case with imitative towns, proved to be a cunning device with two barbs.  It militated to hold the workers to their jobs in a state of quasi serfdom, and it gave the company additional avenues of exploiting its workers beyond the ordinary and usual limits of wages and profits.  In reality, it was one of the forerunners of an incoming feudalistic sway, without the advantages to the wage worker that the lowly possessed under medieval feudalism.  It was also an apparent polished improvement, but nothing more, over the processes at the coal mines in Pennsylvania, Illinois and other States where the miners were paid the most meager wages, and were compelled to return those wages to the coal companies and bear an incubus of debt besides, by being forced to buy all of their goods and merchandise at company stores at extortionate rates.  But where the coal companies did the thing boldly and crudely, the Pullman Company surrounded the exploitation with deceptive embellishments.

The mechanism, although indirect, was simple.  While, for instance, the cost of gas to the Pullman Company was only thirty-three cents a thousand feet, every worker living in the town of Pullman had to pay at the rate of $2.25 a thousand feet.  If he desired to retain his job he could not avoid payment ,  the company owned the exclusive supply of gas and was the exclusive landlord.  The company had him in a clamp from which he could not well escape.  The workers were housed in ugly little pens, called cottages, built in tight rows, each having five rooms and “conveniences.”  For each of these cottages $18 rent a month was charged.  The city of Chicago, the officials of which were but the mannequins or hirelings of the industrial magnates, generously supplied the Pullman Company with water at four cents a thousand gallons.  For this same water the company charged its employees ten cents a thousand gallons, or about seventy-one cents a month.  By this plan the company, in addition, obtained its water supply for practically nothing.  Even for having shutters on the houses the workers were taxed fifty cents a month.  These are some specimens of the company’s many devious instrumentalities for enchaining and plundering its thousands of workers.

In the panic year of 1893 the Pullman Company reduced wages one-fourth, yet the cost of rent, water, gas,of nearly all other fundamental necessities  remained the same.  As the average yearly pay of at least 4,497 of the company’s wage workers was little more than $600 or, to be exact, $613.86 this reduction, in a large number of cases, was equivalent to forcing these workers to yield up their labors for substantially nothing.  Numerous witnesses testified before the special commission appointed later by President Cleveland, that at times their bi-weekly checks ran variously from four cents to one dollar.  The company could not produce evidence to disprove this.  These sums represented the company’s indebtedness to them for their labor, after the company had deducted rent and other charges.  Such manifold robberies aroused the bitterest resentment among the company’s employees, since especially it was a matter of authentic knowledge, disclosed by the company’s own reports, that the Pullman factories were making enormous profits.  At this time, the Pullman workers were $70,000 in arrears to the company for rent alone.

THE PULLMAN EMPLOYEES STRIKE.

Finally plucking up courage , for it required a high degree of moral bravery to subject themselves and their families to the further want, inevitably ensuing from a strike , the workers of the Pullman Company demanded a restoration of the old scale of wages.  An arrogant refusal led to the declaration of a strike on May 11, 1894.  This strike, and the greater strike following, were termed by Carroll D. Wright, for a time United States Commissioner of Labor, as “ probably the most expensive and far-reaching labor controversy which can properly be classed among the historic controversies of this generation.”2  The American Railway Union, composed of the various grades of workers on a large number of railroads, declared a general sympathetic strike under the delegated leadership of Eugene V. Debs. The strike would perhaps have been successful had it not been that the entire powers of the National Government, and those of most of the States affected, were used roughshod to crush this mighty labor uprising.  The whole newspaper press, with rare exceptions, spread the most glaring falsehoods about the strike and its management.  Debs was personally and venomously assailed in vituperation that has had little equal.  To put the strikers in the attitude of sowing violence, the railroad corporations deliberately instigated the burning or destruction of their own cars (they were cheap, worn out freight cars), and everywhere had thugs and roughs as its emissaries to preach, and provoke, violence.3  The object was threefold ,  to throw the onus upon the strikers of being a lawless body ,  to give the newspapers an opportunity of inveighing with terrific effect against the strikers, and, to call upon the Government for armed troops to shoot down, overawe, or in other ways thwart, the strikers.

Government was, in reality, directed by the railroad and other corporations.  United States judges, at the behest of the railroad companies (which had caused them to be appointed to the Bench), issued extraordinary, unprecedented injunctions against the strikers.  These injunctions even prevented the strikers from persuading fellow employees to quit work.  So utterly without any basis in law were these injunctions that the Federal Commission reported ,  “ It is seriously questioned, and with much force, whether the courts have jurisdiction to enjoin citizens from ‘persuading’ each other in industrial matters of common interest.”  But the injunctions were enforced.  Debs and his comrades were convicted of contempt of court and, without jury trial, imprisoned at a critical juncture of the strike.  And what was their offense ?  Nothing more than seeking to induce other workers to take up the cause of their striking fellow-workers.  The judges constituted themselves as prosecuting attorney, judge and jury.  Never had such high-handed judicial usurpation been witnessed.  As a concluding stroke, President Cleveland ordered a detachment of the United States army to Chicago.  The pretexts were that the strikers were interfering with interstate commerce and with the carrying of mails.[Now if that is not tyranny,I do not know what is DC]

VAST PROFITS AND LOW WAGES.

That the company’s profits were great at the identical time the workers were curtailed to a starvation basis, there can be no doubt.  The general indignation and agitation caused by the summary proceedings during the strike, compelled President Cleveland to appoint a commission to investigate.  Cleveland was a mediocre politician who, by a series of fortuitous circumstances, had risen from ward politics to the Presidency.  After using the concentrated power of the Federal Government to break the strike, he then decided to “ investigate ” its merits.  It was the shift and ruse of a typical politician.

The Special Commission, while not selected of men who could in the remotest degree be accused of partiality toward the workers, brought out a volume of significant facts, and handed in a report marked by considerable and unexpected fairness.  The report showed that the Pullman Company’s capital had been increased from $1,000,000 in 1867 to $36,000,000 in 1894.  “ Its prosperity,” the Commission reported, “has enabled the company for over twenty years to pay two per cent. quarterly dividends”.  But this eight per cent. annual dividend was not all.  In certain years the dividends had ranged from nine and one half, to twelve, per cent.  In addition, the Commission further reported, the company had laid by a reserve fund in the form of a surplus of $25,000,000 of profits which had not been divided.  For the year ending July 31, 1893, the declared dividends were $2,520,000 ;  the wages $7,223,719.51.  During the next year, when wages were cut one-fourth, the stockholders divided as even greater amount in profits :  $2,880,000.  Wages went to $4,471,701.39.4

If Field’s revenue was so proportionately large from this one property — the Pullman works — it is evident that his total revenue from the large array of properties which he owned, or in which he held bonds or stock, was very great.

It is probable that in the latter years of his life his annual net income was, at the very least, $5,000,000.  This is an extremely conservative estimate.  More likely it reached $10,000,000 a year.  Computing the sum upon which the average of his workers had to live (to make a very liberal allowance) at $800 a year, this sum of $5,000,000 flowing in to him every year, without in the slightest trenching upon his principal, was equal to the entire amount that 6,250 of his employees earned by the skill of their brains and hands, and upon which they had to support themselves and their families.

Here, then, was one individual who appropriated to his use as much as six thousand men and more who laboriously performed service to the community.  For that $5,000,000 a year Field had nothing to do in return except to worry over the personal or business uses to which his surplus revenues should be put ,  like a true industrial monarch he relieved himself of superfluous cares by hiring the ability to supervise and manage his properties for him.

Such an avalanche of riches tumbled in upon him that, perforce, like the Astors, the Goelets and other multimillionaires, he was put constantly to the terrible extremity of seeking new fields for investment.  Luxuriously live, as he did, it would have required a superior inventive capacity to have dissipated his full income.  But, judging his life by that of some other multimillionaires, he lived modestly.  Of medium height and Spare figure, he was of rather unobtrusive appearance.  In his last years his hair and mustache were white.  His eyes were gray and cold, his expression one of determination and blandly assertive selfishness.  His eulogists, however, have glowingly portrayed him as “ generous, philanthropic and public-spirited.”

“A MODEL OF BUSINESS INTEGRITY.”

In fact, it was a point descanted upon with extraordinary emphasis during Field’s lifetime and following his demise that, (to use the stock phrase which with wearying ceaselessness went the rounds of the press), he was “ a businessman of the best type.”  From this exceptional commentary it can be seen what was the current and rooted opinion of the character of business men in general.  Field’s rigorous exploitation of his tens of thousands of workers in his stores, in his Pullman factories, and elsewhere, was not a hermetically sealed secret , but this exploitation, no matter to what extremes it was carried, was an ordinary routine of prevailing business methods.5[a businessman of the best type,but a horrible human being DC]

Of the virtual enslavement of the worker ,  of the robbing him of what he produced ,  of the drastic laws enforced against him ,  of the debasement of men, women and children , of all of these facts the organs of public expression, the politicians and the clergy, with few exceptions, said nothing.

Everywhere, except in obscure quarters of despised workingmen’s meetings, or in the writings or speeches of a few intellectual protestors, the dictum was proclaimed and instilled that conditions were just and good.  In a thousand disingenuous ways, backed by nimble sophistry, the whole ruling class, with its clouds of retainers, turned out either an increasing flood of praise of these conditions, or masses of misinforming matter which tended to reconcile or blind the victim to his pitiful drudgery.  The masters of industry, who reaped fabulous riches from such a system, were covered with slavish adulation, and were represented in flowery, grandiloquent phrases as indispensable men, without whom the industrial system of the country could not be carried on.  Nay, even more ,  while being plundered and ever anew plundered of the fruits of their labor, the workers were told, (as they are increasingly being told), that they should honor the magnates and be thankful to them for providing work.

HE STEALS MILLIONS IN TAXES.

Marshall Field, as we have said, was heralded far and wide as an unusually honest business man, the implication being that every cent of his fortune was made fairly and squarely.  Those fawners to wealth, and they were many, who persisted in acclaiming his business methods as proper and honorable, were grievously at a loss for an explanation when his will was probated, and it was found that even under the existing laws, favorable as they were to wealth, he had been nothing more than a common perjurer and a cheat.  It was too true, alas !  This Man “ of strict probity ” had to be catalogued with the rest of his class.

For many years he had insisted on paying taxes on personal property on a valuation of not more than $2,500,000 ,  and the pious old shopkeeper had repeatedly threatened, in case the board of assessors should raise his assessment, that he would forthwith bundle off his domicile from Chicago, and reside in a place where  assessors refrain from too much curiosity as to one’s belongings.  But lo! when the schedule of his property was filed in court, it was disclosed that for many years he had owned at least $17,500,000 Of taxable personal property subject to the laws of the State of Illinois.  Thus was another idol cruelly shattered ,  for the aforesaid fawners had never tired of exulting elaborately upon the theme of Field’s success, and how it was due to his absolute integrity and pure, undefiled character.

At another time the facts of his thefts of taxes might have been suppressed or toned down.  But at this particular juncture Chicago happened to have a certain corporation counsel who, while mildly infected with conventional views, was not a truckler to wealth.  Suit was brought in behalf of the city for recovery of $1,730,000 back taxes.  So clear was the case that the trustees of Field’s estate decided to compromise.  On March 2, 1908, they delivered to John R. Thompson, treasurer of Cook County, a check for one million dollars.  If the compound interest for the whole series of years during which Field cheated in taxation were added to the $1,730,000, it would probably be found that the total amount of his frauds had reached fully three million dollars.

The chorus of astonishment that ascended when these facts were divulged was an edifying display.  He who did not know that the entire propertied class made a regular profession of perjury and fraud in order to cheat the public treasury out of taxes, was either deliciously innocent or singularly uninformed.  Year after year a host of municipal and State officials throughout the United States issued reports showing this widespread condition.  Yet aside from their verbose complainings, which served political purpose in giving an air of official vigilance, the authorities did nothing.

PERJURY AND CHEATING COMMON.

As a matter of fact, the evasion of taxes by the Pullman Company had been a public scandal for many years.  John P. Altgeld, Governor of Illinois in 1893-95, frequently referred to it in his speeches and public papers.  Field, then, not only personally cheated the public treasury out of millions, but also the corporations which he controlled did likewise.  The propertied class everywhere did the same.  The unusually thorough report of the Illinois Labor Bureau of 1894 demonstrated how the most valuable land and buildings in Chicago were assessed at the merest fraction of their true value — the costliest commercial buildings at about one-tenth, and the richest residences at about one-fourteenth, of their actual value.  As for personal property it contributed a negligible amount in taxes.6

The reports of the tax committee of the Boston Executive Business Association in 1891 estimated that two billion dollars of property in Boston escaped taxation, and that the public treasury was cheated out of about $17,000,000 in taxes every year.  As for New York City, we have seen how the Astors, the Schermerhorns, the Goelets — the whole aggregate of the propertied class — systematically defrauded in taxes for many decades.  It is estimated that in New York City, at present, not less than five billion dollars of property, real and personal, entirely escapes taxation.  This estimate is a conservative one.

Spahr, after an exhaustive investigation in the United States concluded more than a decade ago that, “ the wealthy class pay less than one-tenth of the indirect taxes, the well-to-do less than one-quarter, and the relatively poorer classes more than two-thirds.”7  What Spahr omitted was this highly important qualification ,When the rich do pay.  Tenants of the property owners must pay their rent on time or suffer eviction, but the capitalists are allowed to take their own leisurely time in paying such portion of their taxes as remains after the bulk of the tax list has been perjured away.  Thus in a report he made public on February 28, 1908, Controller Metz, of New York City, pointed out that the huge amount of $102,834,227, was due the city in uncollected taxes, much of which amount ran several decades back.  Of this sum $29,816,513 was owed on real estate, on which the taxes were a direct lien.

The beauties of law as made and enforced by the property interests, are herein illustriously exemplified.  A poor tenant can be instantly dispossessed, whether sick or in destitution, for non-payment of rent ;  the landowner is allowed by officials who represent, and defer to him and his class, to owe large amounts in taxes for long periods, and not a move is taken to dispossess him.

And now by the most natural gradation, we come to those much be praised acts of our multi-millionaires — the seignorial donating of millions to “ charitable ” or “ public-spirited ” purposes.

Like the Astors, the Schermerhorns, the Rhinelanders and a galaxy of others, Field diffused large sums ;  he, like them, was overwhelmed with panegyrics.  Millions Field gave toward the founding and sustaining of the Field Colombian Museum in Chicago, and to the University of Chicago.  It may be parenthetically added that, (to repeat), he owned, adjacent to this latter institution, many blocks of land the increased value of which, after the establishment of the University, more than recouped him for his gifts.  This might have been either accidental or it might have been cold calculation ;  judging from Field’s consistent methods, it was probably not chance.

So composite, however, is the human character, so crossed and seamed by conflicting influences, that at no time is it easy to draw any absolute line between motives.  Merely because he exploited his employees mercilessly, and cheated the public treasury out of millions of dollars, it does not necessarily follow that Field was utterly deficient in redeeming traits.  As business is conducted, it is well known that many successful men (financially), who practice the most cruel and oppressive methods, are, outside the realm of strict business transactions, expansively generous and kind.  In business they are beasts of prey, because under the private property system, competition, whether between small or large concerns, is reduced to a cutthroat struggle, and those who are in the contest must abide by its desperate rules.  They must let no sympathy or tenderness interpose in their business dealings, else they are lost.

But without entering into a further philosophical disquisition, this fact must be noted :  The amounts that Field gave for “philanthropy” were about identical with the sums out of which he defrauded Chicago in the one item of taxes alone.  Probed into, it is seen that a great part of the sums that multimillionaires have given, represent but a tithe of the sums cheated by them in taxes.  William C. Schermerhorn donates $300,000 to Columbia University ;  the aggregate amount that he defrauded in taxes was much more.  Thus do our magnates supply themselves with present and posthumous fame gratuitously.  Not to consider the far greater and incalculably more comprehensive question of their appropriating the resources of the country and the labor of hundreds of millions of people,8 and centering attention upon this one concrete instance of frauds in taxes, the situation presented is an incongruous one.  Money belonging to the public treasury they retain by fraud ,  this money, apparently a part of their “honestly acquired” fortune, is given in some form of philanthropy,  and then by some curious oversetting of even conventional standards, they reap blessings and glory for giving what are really stolen funds.

“ Those who enjoy his confidence,” wrote an effervescent eulogist of Field, “predict that the bulk of his vast fortune will be devoted to purposes of public utility.”  But this prediction did not materialize.

$140,000,000 TO TWO BOYS.

Field’s fortune, conservatively estimated at $100,000,000, yet, in fact, reaching about $140,000,000, was largely bequeathed to his two grandsons, Marshall Field III., and Henry Field.  Marshall Field, as did many other multimillionaires of his period, welded his fortune into a compact and vested institution.  It ceased to be a personal attribute, and became a thing, an inert mass of money, a corporate entity.  This he did by creating, by the terms of his will, a trust of his fortune for the two boys.  The provisions of the will set forth that $72,000,000 was to set aside in trust for Marshall III., until the year 1954.  At the expiration of that period it, together with its accumulation, was to be turned over to him.  To the other grandson, Henry, $48,000,000 was bequeathed under the same conditions.

These sums are not in money, although at all times Field had a snug sum of cash stowed away ,  when he died he had about $4,500,000 in banks.  The fortune that he left was principally in the form of real estate and bond’s and stocks.  These constituted a far more effective cumulative agency than money.  They were, and are, inexorable mortgages on the labor of millions of workers, men, women and children, of all occupations.  By this simple screed, called a will, embodying one man’s capricious indulgence, these boys, utterly incompetent even to grasp the magnitude of the fortune owned by them, and incapable of exercising the glimmerings of management, were given legal, binding power over a mass of people for generations.  Patterson says that in the Field stores and Pullman factories fifty thousand people work for these boys.9  But these are the direct employees ;  as we have seen, Field owned bonds and stock in more than one hundred and fifty industrial, railroad, mining and other corporations.  The workers of all these toil for the Field boys.

They delve in mines, and risk accident, disease and death, or suffer an abjectly lingering life of impoverishment.  Thousands of coal miners are killed every year, and many thousands more are injured, in order that two boys and others of their class may draw huge profits.”10  More than 10,000 persons are killed, and 97,000 injured, every year on the railroads, so that the income enjoyed by these lads and others shall not diminish.  Nearly all of these casualties are due to economizing in expense, working employees to an extreme fatiguing limit, and refusing to provide proper safety appliances.  Millions more workers drudge in rolling mills, railroad shops and factories ;  they wear out their lives on farms, in packing houses and stores.  For what ?  Why, foolish questioner, for the rudiments of an existence ;  do you not know that the world’s dispossessed must pay heavily for the privilege of living ?  As these lads hold, either wholly or partly, the titles to all this inherited property ;  in plain words, to a formidable part of the machinery of business, the millions of workers must sweat and bend the back, and pile up a ceaseless flow of riches for them.

Marshall Field III., still in knickerbockers, receives $60,000 a week ;  his brother Henry, $40,000 a week.  The sum in both cases automatically increases as the interest on the principal compounds.  What do many of the workers who supply this revenue get ?  Patterson gives this authentic list of wages :

Pullman Company blacksmiths, $16.43 a week , boilermakers,$17, carpenters, $12.38 ,  machinists, $16.65 ;  painters, $13.60, and laborers, $9.90 a week.  As for the lower wages paid to the workers in the Field stores, we have already given them.  And apart from the exploitation of employees, every person in Chicago who rides on the street or elevated railroads, and who uses gas, electricity or telephones, must pay direct tribute to these lads.  How decayed monarchical establishments are in these days !  Kings mostly must depend upon Parliaments for their civil lists of expenditure ,  but Capitalism does not have to ask leave of anybody ,  it appropriates what it wants.

This is the status of the Field fortune now.  Let the Field striplings bless their destiny that they live in no medieval age, when each baron had to defend his possessions by his strong right arm successfully, or be compelled to relinquish.  This age is one when Little Lord Fauntleroys can own armies of profit producers, without being distracted from their toys.  Whatever defense is needed is supplied by society, with its governments and its judges, its super serviceable band of lawyers, and its armed forces.  Two delicate children are upheld in enormous possessions and vast power, while millions of fellow beings are suffered to remain in destitution.

END OF VOL. I.

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1 Census of 1900.

2 Eighth Annual Report, Illinois Labor Bureau: 370.

3 See his work, “If Christ Came to Chicago.”  Much more specific and reliable is the report of the U.S. Industrial Commission.  After giving the low wages paid to women in the different cities, it says :  “It is manifest from the figures given that the amout of earnings in many cases is less than the actual cost of the necessities of life.  The existence of such a state of affairs must inevitably lead in many cases to the adoption of a life of immorality and, in fact, there is no doubt that the low rate of wages paid to women is one of the most frequent causes of prostitution.  The fact that the great mass of working women maintain their virtue in spite of low wages and dangerous environment is highly creditable to them.”—Final Report of the Industrial Commission, 1902, xix:927.

4 See an article on this point by the Rev. F.M. Goodchild in the “Arena” Magazine for March, 1896.

5 In the course of inquiries among the Chicago religious missions in 1909, the author was everywhere informed that the great majority of native prostitutes were products of the department stores.  Some of the conditions in these department stores, and how their owners have fought every effort to better these conditions, have been revealed in many official reports.  The appended description is from the Annual Report of the Factory Inspectors of Illinois, 1903-04, pp. ix and x :
      “ In this regard, and worthy of mention, reference might be made to the large dry goods houses and department stores located in Chicago and other cities, in which places it has been customary to employ a great number of children under the age of sixteen as messenger boys, bundle wrappers, or as cash boys or cash girls, wagon boys, etc.  In previous years these children were required to come to work early in the morning and remain until late at night, or as long as the establishment was open for business, which frequently required the youngsters to remain anywhere from 8:00 to 9:00 o’clock in the morning until 10:00 and 11:00 p.m., their weak and immature bodies tired and worn out under the strain of the customary holiday rush.  In the putting a stop to this practice of employing small children ten and thirteen hours per day, the department found it necessary to institute frequent prosecutions.  While our efforts were successful, we met with serious opposition, and in some cases almost continuous litigation, some 300 arrests being necessary to bring about the desired results, which finally secured the eight hour day and a good night’s rest for the small army of toilers engaged in the candy and paper box manufacturing establishments and department stores.
      “ In conducting these investigations and crusades the inspectors met with some surprises in the way of unique excuses.  In Chicago a manager of a very representative first class department store, one of the largest of its kind, gave as his reason for not obeying the law, that they had never been interfered with before.  Another, that the children preferred to be in the store rather than at home.  The unnaturalness of this latter excuse can be readily realized by anyone who has stepped into a large department store during the holiday season, when the clerks are tired and cross and little consideration is shown to the cash boy or cash girl who, because he or she may be tired or physically frail, might be a little tardy in running an errand or wrapping a bundle.  This character of work for long hours is deleterious to a child, as are the employments in many branches of the garment trade or other industries, which labor is so openly condemned by those who have been interested in anti-child labor movements.”

6 For detailed particulars see that part of this work comprising “Great Fortunes from Public Franchises.”

7 The acts here summarized are narrated specifically in Part III, “Great Fortunes from Railroads.”

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1 “The Truth About the Trusts ”:266-267.

2 “Industrial Evolution of the United States,” 313.

3 Parsons, “The Railways, the Trusts and the People” : 196. Also, Report of Chicago Chief of Police for 1894.  This was a customary practice of railroad, industrial and mining capitalists.  Further facts are brought out in other parts of this work.

4 “Report on the Chicago Strike of June and July, 1894,” by the United States Strike Commissioners, 1895.— Throughout all subsequent years, and at present, the Pullman Company has continued charging the public exorbitant rates for the use of its cars.  Numerous bills have been introduced in various legislatures to compel the company to reduce its rates.  The company has squelched these measures.  Its consistent policy is well known of paying its porters and conductors such poor wages that the 15,000,000 passengers who ride in Pullman cars every year are virtually obliged to make up the deficiency by tips.

5 Sweeping as this statement may impress the uninitiated, it is entirely within the facts.  As one of many indisputable confirmations it is only necessary to refer to the extended debate over child labor in the United States Senate on January 23, 28, and 29, 1907, in which it was conclusively shown that more than half a million children under fifteen years of age were employed in factories, mines and sweatshops.  It was also brought out how the owners of these properties bitterly resisted the passage or enforcement of restrictive laws.

6 Eighth Biennial Report of the Illinois Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1894.  The report, made public in August, 1909, of the Illinois Tax Reform League’s investigation of the Chicago Board of Review’s assessments, showed that these frauds in evading taxation not only continue, but on a much greater scale than ever before.  The Illinois Tax Reform League asserted, among other statements, that Edward Morris, head of a large packing company, was not assessed on personal property, whereas he owned $43,000,000 worth of securities, which the League specified.  The League called upon the Board of Review to assess J. Ogden Armour, one of the chiefs of the Beef Trust, on $30,840,000 of personal property.  Armour was being yearly assessed on only $200,000 of personal property.  These are two of the many instances given in the report in question.  It is estimated (in 1909), that back taxes on at least a billion dollars of assessable corporate capital stock, are due the city from a multitude of individuals and corporations.

7 “The Present Distribution of Wealth in the United States”:143.

8 “Hundreds of millions of people.” Not only are the 85,000,000 people of the United States compelled to render tribute, but the peoples of other countries all over the globe.

9 “ Marshall Field’s Will” by Joseph Medill Patterson.  Reprinted in pamphlet form from “Collier’s Weekly.”

10 The number of men killed per 100,000 employed has increased from 267 a year in 1895 to about 355 at present.  (See report of J.A. Holmes, chief of the technological branch of the United States Geological Survey.) The chief reason for this slaughter is because it is more profitable to hire cheap, inexperienced men, and not surround the work with proper safeguards.