CHAPTER IVYOUTH AMONG THE MONEY-MANIACS
Thetypical young men of the America of fashion and high finance, created by the multi-millionaire, fall into two classes—the born successes, sons or heirs of rich men; the candidates for success. It is hardly necessary to say that in this connection success always means the accumulation of riches enough to enable one to make a stir even among the very rich.
If the young man is a born success, all that is left for him to achieve is to devise some plan for making a stir—the simplest way being to marry some woman with a talent for doing original and striking things. No matter how great his income, if he is not to suffer the fate of being an obscure follower, a merely rich person, suspected of stinginess, stupidity and vulgarity to boot, he must do something out of the ordinary—assemble an astonishing establishment,have the finest pictures, give the finest dinners and dances, run the fastest horses or the most demoniac automobile, give large sums on some original plan to education and philanthropy.
The chances are that the born success will marry in his own set—that is, the daughter or the heiress of some rich man. This will be due in large part to deliberation; also, neither is likely to know well many people who are not rich or of the rich. If he is the eldest son, the probabilities, the increasing probabilities are that he will inherit the bulk of the fortune, no matter how many brothers and sisters he may have. Some one in the next generation must maintain the family magnificence. Naturally, therefore, an unwritten law of primogeniture is rapidly growing in force and effect.
And this custom, combined with the rapidity with which great wealth piles up in America for him who has great commercial skill, insures us a future of ever more dazzling splendor, of luxury and extravagance—animmediatefuture; we will not here speculate as to that future which is more remote, but not less certain.
A short time ago a young man—a “born success”—went to a beautiful country house near NewYork to make a Saturday-to-Monday visit. He brought with him two huge trunks. These were taken to the almost magnificent suite of rooms which had been assigned to him. His valet unlocked the trunks and summoned the chambermaid. The two servants stripped from the bed the sheets and pillow-cases and covers; then from the trunks they took the young man’s own wonderful bed-clothing, woven especially for him by the best looms in Europe. These creations were put on the bed in place of the silk and fine linen which the owner of the country house, a very rich man, regarded as fit for a king, but which this young man thought far too coarse for contact with his delicate skin.
The host was given to extravagance, was used to and in sympathy with the eccentric efforts of too-rich people to attract attention to themselves. But this insulting refinement “got” on his nerves. As his guest was a very rich man, and was therefore entitled to that reverential deference which only the rich are capable of feeling for and giving to the rich, the host let no outward sign of his state of mind appear. But he confided the insult to his other guests as a “joke,” and had them privately laughing and jeering at his young friend.
This young man is one of the small advance guard of the new generation of plutocrats—the generation that has about the same knowledge of life as it is lived by the great mass of Americans that we have of the mode of life in a Hottentot kraal. We shall soon be far better acquainted with these sons and grandsons of somebodies than we are at present. Soon the wealth and industrial energy of the country will be controlled by them, or, rather, through them by a clever and unscrupulous few. Let us therefore pause for a moment upon these American “born successes,” taking at random some one of them as a type—one we will call, for convenience, Jones.
His father was a great business man, and in forty years of intelligent, incessant and unscrupulous effort amassed a vast fortune so invested that it gave the possessor control of an enormous financial and industrial area. The father was a self-made man; he had a profound reverence for book-learning; he was resolved that none of his own deficiencies should be reproduced in his son. His boy was to be a “cultured gentleman,” moving in the “best society.” Also, the boy should have all the “fun” which first poverty and then businesscares had denied to the old man. He sent young Jones to the most famous schools both here and abroad; and he gave him plenty of money. It is not definitely known whether the old man was proud of the results of his method of bringing up a boy so far as he saw them before he died; but there is reason to believe that he was. Certainly, the boy was as different as it is possible to imagine from his plain, rather coarse, very manly if also very unscrupulous father. The boy had all his father’s supreme contempt for the ordinary moral code and for the mass of “weaklings” who live under it and suffer themselves to be plucked. There the resemblance between the two ends. In place of a brain, the boy acquired at college and elsewhere a lump of vanities, affectations and poses. Surrounded by hirelings from infancy, he became convinced that he was the handsomest in body and the most brilliant in mind that the world had in recent centuries produced. He thought, having been assured of it by shopkeepers and agents, that his taste was almost too fine for a coarse, commercial era, that his nerves were almost too delicate even for the works of the greatest musicians and painters and sculptors and poets, that he wasliving both within and without a sort of tone-poem.
When he came into his own and descended to Wall street, he was gratified but not surprised to learn that Wall street entertained his own exalted opinion of himself. And when he heard on every side that, in addition to being such an exquisite as a Lucullus or a Louis XIV would have copied, he was the greatest financier that ever lived, a boy-wonder at high finance, a greater than his father, the brain of a Nathan Rothschild in the body of a young Apollo, he accepted it all as the matter-of-course. Like so many of our very rich, he had an economical streak in him—but this was a profound secret, hardly known even to himself. So, he readily fell in with Wall street’s pleasant way of saving its own money and living off the money of other people. He plunged into the wildest extravagances, imitating and striving to outdo the young scions of plutocracy with whom he associated uptown. And like them, he made the people of whose trust funds his wealth gave him control, pay the bills. It is vulgar to pay one’s own bills, but there is no objection to their being paid out of another’s pocket. It saves one from the degradationof counting the cost, of thinking about prices and limits of incomes and such low things.
No sooner was he fairly launched than a half dozen of the great plutocrats, with wild shouts of adulation, proclaimed him their leader, put him in a commanding position in all their big swindling schemes called “finance” in Wall street. “You’re it, my lad,” they cried. “We take a back seat. Go up front where you belong. We’ll do whatever you say.”
Is it strange that the young man went about as if he were Mercury of the winged feet? Is it strange that he got into the habit of greeting his fellow-men with that gracious sweetness which kings alone have—and they only on the stage or in novels? And when it is added that uptown the married women flattered him, all the girls languished upon him, everybody pronounced him a devil of a fellow, a heart-breaker, a real, twenty-four carat, all-wool “cuss,” is it not wonderful that he did not go quite mad and dress in purple and wear laces and a sword?
Indeed, he did have those moments of absolute mental aberration, and had to go to or give fancy balls to hide his lunacy from the world. At thoseballs he always dressed in some ancient kingly costume; and so evident was it that he thought himself indeed a king, holding a grand levee, that a smirk followed in his wake as he stepped grandly about—a smirk that burst into a titter as soon as he was out of ear-shot. Yet really he was not the least bit more ridiculous than the other sons and daughters of plutocracy, all dressed up as kings and queens and nobles and grandees, and wondering if the imaginary were not the real and their moments in ordinary clothes a nightmare.
On and on he went, madder and madder, so crazy about himself that even his plutocratic “lieutenants,” who were using him as a stool-pigeon, could hardly keep their faces straight. At last he got to the stage at which the old kings of France got just before the Revolution—the mental state superinduced by beginning their education by setting in their copy-books as a writing model, “Kings may do whatever they please.” He never had had any sense of trusteeship; he had been flattered into believing that the railway or manufactory in which he owned a large amount of stock was his very own, that wages and salaries paid and dividends declared were his royal and gracious largess. Buthe at first had a dim sense that this great truth must not be publicly aired, that it was prudent to let the common people believe they had some share in the enterprise. Now, however, this dim respect for, or, rather, tolerance of, a popular delusion vanished. With rolling eyes and haughty nose and lips and high-stepping legs he advanced boldly and publicly into his kingdom. A Russian grand-duke said of the Russian people, “These fleas imagine they are the dog.” Young Jones said in effect the same thing of the depositors and stockholders in “my” enterprises, and showed publicly that he thought it.
Great excitement. His plutocrat “lieutenants,” seeing that their graft through this joyous young ass was imperiled, tried to quiet him. Failing there, they tried to cajole, then to cow the insurgent “fleas.” But all in vain. The ears of Jones, attuned only to adulatory sounds, were assailed by such shuddering rudenesses as “Petty larceny thief! Jackass! Swindler! Puller-in for the big gamblers! Crazy numskull!”
Frightful, wasn’t it? Not that he was in the least disturbed in his own exalted opinion of himself. An angel come from heaven direct wouldhave moved him only to light, incredulous laughter by telling him the plain truth about himself. Still, the clamor was unpleasant; the open sneers, the sly stabs. And, above all, the ingratitude! The ingratitude of his associates in “society” who had got so much expensive entertainment and so much inspiration from him. The ingratitude of the people, his vassals, whom he paid salaries and wages and dividends, whom he permitted to deposit in his banks and to invest in his enterprises!
His soul is brave, as becomes the soul porphyrogenetic. But, as it is also a sensitive soul, how it is wrung!
The trouble with our young Jones is that he was premature—not in thought, but in showing his thoughts. Only premature. The madness that ravaged him is in the plutocratic air. Many eyes are rolling, many fingers are twitching in the premonitory symptoms of the malady. A few years at our plutocracy’s present rate of progress, and Jones will be recognized as a martyr. “Jones was born a little too soon. Jones came to a climax a little before the season,” the dandies will say.
June is the time for roses. Jones came in April. Poor Jones! Poor April rose!
Such is the mode of the “born success”; now for the young man who is born with brains and appetites and ambitions only. He is determined to achieve a plutocratic success; looks about him for the road that leads to palaces, equipages, yachts—all that gives one title to a seat at the table of honor at this banquet of extravagant luxury. He sees at once that to become a multi-millionaire he must use his brains to force or to cajole the multi-millionaires to make him one of them.
He must pattern after those who are far on the way to achieving his kind of success: this corporation lawyer earning his hundred thousand or more a year as the legal servant of rich men; that railway president with his fifty thousand a year and perquisites, earned as the commercial servant of rich men; that manager getting a salary of one hundred and twenty-five thousand as a seeker of safe investments for surplus millions of income—again a servant of rich men; that bank president with salary and opportunities together netting him upward of two hundred thousand a year—again a servant of the rich; that broker who put by half a million last year as a result of his skill and assiduity in the service of rich operators; that doctor whomade seventy-five thousand in fees and two hundred thousand in Wall Street last year on “tips” from grateful patients—again the rewards of service to the rich.
Our young candidate for success has brains to sell; he wants customers with money. He hopes ultimately to sell these brains at a very high price; he wants customers with lots of money, millions of money, in which he may presently share largely. He must ingratiate himself with the rich; must go where they are to be found, not only in business hours, but also in hours of relaxation. He must not only work hard; he must also play hard and high—must lead the life of the rich as far as possible. His air, his dress, his style of living, all must be such that he will be regarded as rich and progressive. To drudge and to economize and to keep away from the extravagance downtown and up will mean a small success, or at best one that will not lead to the lofty height of fashion and social position upon which he has fixed his eyes.
He may have a streak of incurable folly in him. His effort to be “a man of the world” may draw him from discreet dissipation into that vortex which swallows up all weaklings not secured by greatwealth. But let us suppose that he is not a weakling and that he keeps clearly in mind that at the basis of all success lies clear-headed, incessant industry. He works steadily at his business, commercial or professional; he shows capacity and is advanced; he is soon getting four or five thousand a year. At the same time he has prospered in what may be called the uptown end of his business; he has made acquaintances among the rich socially; several women of importance are interested in him and are telling their husbands and their husbands’ friends that he has brains. The men are seeing that the women are not mistaken.
In any American city except New York or Chicago, our young man would now be regarded as a person of some consequence. In New York or Chicago he has merely reached the point at which he can, if he is sagacious, measure his insignificance. He has worked hard, but the real day’s toil has only begun. He has raised himself from the class that includes hundreds of thousands; but he is still in a class that includes tens of thousands.
Perhaps this discourages him, makes him feel that he can never attain the paradise of multi-millionaires, or that, if he did attain it, he wouldbe too exhausted to enjoy it. Perhaps experience has given him a clearer insight into the real meaning of his ambitions, and he is disgusted with their pettiness and sordidness, and begins to long for self-respect and decency and manhood. Perhaps his dream of success has been interrupted by a dream of sentiment. He may decide to marry and settle down—he has found New York drearily cold and lonely.
In that event he gives up his bachelor apartments in the edge of the fashionable district; he is seen no more at his club—indeed, he has resigned from it; he is forgotten by his fashionable friends; he and his wife live obscurely in a flat or an apartment hotel far from the world of fashion, or in a cottage down in the country—a commuter’s cottage, as unlike as possible the multi-millionaire’s cottage of marble or limestone, of which he once dreamed. And as he is no longer of the world with which we are concerned, he drops out of sight—for the present.
But, on the other hand, perhaps his discovery of his insignificance does not discourage him, but only serves to rouse him to greater efforts. His close inspection of the palaces and performances of thefashionable and extravagant rich has fired his imagination and energy. In that case he does not marry. “I am too poor,” he says, as he looks at his paltry income of five thousand a year and thinks on the humble ménage it would maintain, and remembers that his poorest married acquaintances up in the Fifth avenue or Lake Drive district have fifteen thousand a year and cannot afford to entertain or to keep a carriage, and are always fretting about money. He considers what a “decent” hat or dress for a woman costs, and—well, his tailor’s bill was seven hundred dollars last year and he has almost no clothes. He remembers his bills for the few small and very modest dinners he gave—a week’s earnings gone in a few minutes and the dinner a poor affair beside the poorest he has had at the houses of his rich acquaintances. To console himself for his heroic sacrifice of sentiment to ambition, he takes a somewhat better apartment for his bachelor self in a more fashionable apartment house—his rent is twelve hundred a year. He works hard downtown; he continues to work hard uptown. He works as cleverly in the one quarter as in the other. He is always seen with rich people; he belongs to fashionable clubs; he dines in palaces;he goes for Saturday-to-Monday visits at great, extravagantly maintained country houses; he is seen in boxes at the opera, at the horse show; he expands his tastes and his expenditures with his rapidly expanding income. His “fixed charges” are now fifteen thousand a year—very moderate for a man of his associations.
In addition to these absolute necessities he spends about fifteen thousand more upon presents and entertaining. Half a dozen men living in the apartment house he lives in spend twice as much as he does and do not consider themselves, and are not considered, either extravagant or dissipated.
He is making a great deal of money, but he feels—and is—poor. However, he is sustained and soothed by the certainty of riches immediately ahead. He has been spending, but it has been in the nature of an investment—a most judicious investment from the standpoint of his purposes. And presently his cleverness and audacity and “large ideas” have their reward; and then he marries.
She has tastes which are exactly his. She is willing to marry him because she has not made the success she and her mother dreamed of and strove for. She has some money—their joint income,while not imposing as New York incomes go, is still large enough to enable them to make “a decent start in life,” as their “set” interprets life.
Presently we find them installed in a “small” house or “little” apartment—the rent is more than ten thousand a year, and they have twelve servants. His skill as a money-maker is talked about; her dresses are admired and envied; their equipages, their surroundings, their dinners are models of luxurious good taste. As both are shrewd managers, their forty thousand a year enables them to seem to be spending twice that amount. They are in the high-road of plutocratic happiness and are creditably charioted. And as the years pass, their increasing wealth rolls up on itself as large wealth has a habit of doing. They annually tour the multi-millionaire circuit in great state—North Carolina, Hempstead, the Hudson, London, Paris, Newport. They have children.
No healthier, rosier, more intelligent children can be found anywhere than theirs. They have the best care that competent nurses and governesses can give. They live by the clock, are fed the most expensive and at the same time the most sensible food. They are dressed in a manner that makesplain mothers blink and stare. There are only two of them and the elder is only seven, but their clothing bill last year was fourteen hundred. It will be less, much less, as they grow older, for it is not good form to dress boys and girls extravagantly—at least not yet. They speak French and German as fluently as they speak English, and far more correctly. They have everything for mind and body—except the direct constant care of their mother. They have everything—that money can buy.
Let us go back to the cross-roads and take a candidate for success who, when he achieved his modest five thousand a year, married and went to live in a flat or small suite in an apartment hotel of the kind that would have been called luxurious a dozen years ago, but is now third-class. Let us assume that his wife, whether she came from out-of-town or from the city, is the typical present-day big-city woman of extravagant ideas—is, like her husband, wealth-crazy and luxury-crazy and society-mad.
In all probability they will have no children. Children are not popular among the extravagant in New York—dogs are less expensive, less troublesome, fully as affectionate and far less unfashionable.The extravagant rich still tolerate children, possibly because of a quaint, made-in-England theory that aristocratic families should maintain the “family line.” But “climbers” cannot afford the necessary time and money. It was Swift—was it not?—who first called attention to the fact that the attitude in climbing and in crawling is the same.
Our young climber is busy all day downtown—busy making money. His wife is busy uptown—busy spending the money he makes, or as much of it as she can threaten or wheedle away from him. She falls into a set of young married women with husbands and tastes like hers. They, like their husbands, think only of wealth and extravagance. And while they wait for their dreams to come true they invest every cent they can lay their hands upon in an imitative vain show.
Our young man’s wife reads the fashionable intelligence with her coffee. She presently goes forth as fashionably dressed as if their income were three or four times what it is. She walks in fashionable streets or sits in some fashionable restaurant, there to view and study and envy the fashionable women she reads about. She “shops” in the fashionable millinery and dressmaking establishments—not tobuy, but to steal hints for the use of her own cheaper milliner and dressmaker in getting together her imitation costumes. She strives to model her person, her dress, her walk, her conduct, her conversation upon the conception of what is fashionable in the multi-millionaire’s set.
As our young man has the genius for money-getting, he gradually becomes rich. As his wealth grows he and his wife “drop” the “friends” of less income, gather about them “friends” of their own fortune, and reach out for “friends” who have fortunes greater than their own. And at last, perhaps by way of a season in London under the guidance of some impecunious woman of title, they arrive at the bliss of being able to tour the multi-millionaire’s circuit in good company all the way. And a crowd gapes at their palace doors and windows whenever they “entertain.”
Those city crowds that pause to gape whenever more than one carriage halts before a palace!
Fifteen years ago the most extravagant millionaire in New York—a great financier—spent upon his domestic establishment, everything included, eighty thousand a year. Very few people of his set spent half as much, and the most of them spentless than twenty-five thousand. To-day, for the fashionable extravagant set, eighty thousand a year would not be far from the average expenditure, taking rich and “poor” together. When that financier’s family were the leaders, the principal entertainments in fashionable society were modest affairs—though they were not then regarded as economical—and were given by association. To-day every palace has its great dining-hall and its huge ballroom. And the very rich who have not palaces give their big entertainments individually in hotels and restaurants, hiring a large part of the building for the exclusive use of their guests, and spending thirty or forty thousand dollars or more—in not a few instances far more—upon each entertainment.
To-morrow—
In this early twentieth century—which bids fair to be known as America’s century—New York, the capital of our plutocracy, blazes out a world-capital. Into it are pouring wealth and luxury, pictures, statuary and works of art of all kinds and periods; jewels and collections of rarities. In it are rising miles on miles of palaces, wonderful parks and driveways. It has begun to be a City Splendid. It has already won a place in the lineof world-capitals back and back through the ages to the mighty, nameless, forgotten cities of the Valley of the Euphrates. And New York begins where the others reached their climax.