After
the Radical Republicans had dispensed with Andrew Johnson and erected
military rule in the devastated American South, came Grant. He was
“utterly naïve in all save military matters, a fact know to the
political leaders who wanted Grant’s reputation under which to hide.
They had put him into the White House with almost no effort at all.”
Bernhard Thuersam
Quality Opportunities to Commit Theft:
“With
the war [Between the States] came what moral philosophers have said was
moral decay in wholesale volume, an apparently illimitable increase in
man’s cupidity. Scandals uncorked during and after the fighting showed
that [Northern] soldiers had been given clothing and blankets made of
shoddy [material]…boots made of paper….meat that had come from diseased
cattle and hogs; they rode hags that had been doctored to make a sale to
the cavalry.
Likely
the moral condition of the country was lower than usual. Perhaps the
moral philosophers should take into account the possibility that man’s
inherent cupidity fluctuates, like a thermometer, with the number and
quality of opportunities to commit theft, legal or otherwise; that the
honesty of too few men is constant. This man is incorruptible to the
figure of, say, $100,000. Many other men will gladly sell for two
dollars the only piece of genuine influence they will ever possess,
which is their vote. Still other men use lead slugs in pay-telephone
boxes.
The
ethics by which men conduct business appear to be no more constant than
individual honesty. The decade after 1865 in the United States appears
in retrospect to have been an extended payday for the vast military
exploit just concluded. Somebody observed it as if [John Wilkes] Booth’s
bullet had released all the chicanery and cupidity of thirty-five
million people. Pastors warned that God’s hand would smite the Republic.
And yet, the more numerous and grosser sort continued to admire the
“smart” man.
[It]
is proper to know what this adjective meant. In early New England
“smart” was not an unqualified compliment. It was reserved for the
peddlers of wooden nutmegs, and later applied to lightning-rod
salesmen. In time some of this primitive meaning was sloughed away,
although “smart” was offensive enough to cause action for libel as late
as 1858. There was something a little wrong with the smart man as the
Civil War came to an end.
The
most notoriously smart figures of the postwar period in the United
States were three characters who without too much exaggeration were also
know as men of disaster. They were Daniel Drew, Jay Gould, and Jim
Fisk…these three smart men were not builders of anything. Many called
them wreckers. “Foul hyenas,” said an editorial writer of the time….
Drew
liked to spout quotes from the Old and New Testaments. He was almost,
but not quite illiterate. Even when he was rated worth several million
dollars, he kept his accounts in his head; he always knew how many [Wall
Street stocks] he held.
When
New Orleans fell into federal hands, Fisk took off to buy cotton for a
Boston syndicate, which made a mint of money quickly. [Drew] recognized
in Fisk just the sort of a front man he wanted for a number of
undercover operations in stocks.
The
[1867] struggle [Drew, Fisk and Gould versus Commodore Vanderbilt]…went
into the history of crime and of finance as the “Erie War,”…..[and]
involved the control of several railroads, and, on occasion, of at least
two legislatures, to say nothing of courts and officials, its name
derived from the New York and Erie Railroad company, surely as
unfortunate a line as ever operated in this or any other country.”
No comments:
Post a Comment