The New Wealth in America

The Chief Objection to it Lies in the Idiocy with Which it is Being Spent

FRANK MOORE COLBY

I DO not believe that envy is at the bottom of our feeling toward the holders of new wealth throughout this country. I believe we should accept it philosophically if there had been an ordinary degree of luck in the getting of it and if there were an ordinary degree of idiocy in the spending of it.

But, in both respects, it exceeds the limits of our experience. I believe that, throughout the country, the new wealth has been coming and going, since the opening of the war, precisely as it has been coming and going at Thompsontown. For Thompsontown, in the main, has done for the new wealth exactly what was done for it by New York, Chicago, and the thousand other Thompsontowns.

I wish to say, at the start, that I see no sin in the sudden wealth of Thompsontown. I am not going to denounce the profiteers of that city or draw any moral lesson from it whatever. I do not believe that the wealth of its inhabitants was, in its origin, either moral or immoral, or that it had anything to do with the relentless working of any economic law. The people of Thompsontown became rich by accident. They did not, in the ordinary sense, make money; they were exposed to it and caught it, like a cold. To attribute the new wealth of Thompsontown to any form of business activity, lawless or otherwise, is totally to misconceive the situation. Great droves of business men became rich through their inactivity; to have avoided money they would have had to dodge.

Hat men—I select hat men, because the civilization of Thompsontown all came from hats—hat men did not conspire to raise the price of hats; nor was there any great, organizing super hat man who amalgamated hats, driving little hatters to suicide. Hat men made, fortunes out of hats, simply because people insisted on their doing so.

I mean this literally.

I mean that the hat man would have had deliberately to thwart his customers, if he had not put up the price of hats. Some hat men did at first keep down the price of hats, and their customers scattered all over town looking for the same hats at higher prices. As wealth increased in Thompsnntown, hat buyers not only preferred a worse hat at a higher price, but would walk a mile to get it.

The sort of people who became rich in Thompsontown had no personal preference whatever between any two hats when considered simply as hats, but only when considered as symbols of opulence. A five-dollar hat gave a five-dollar feeling and a fifteen-dollar hat gave a fifteen-dollar feeling, and so on, and that is all there was to it. Feelings varied with the price, not price with the feelings. Feelings varied with the price, the object purchased remaining the same. Until the people of Thompsontown learn the prices of things, they do not know what to think about them.

And while it was true of everything bought by the great, new, nonplussed hordes of the suddenly prosperous, down to shoes, shirts, underwear, things applicable to the most unimaginative needs, it was particularly true of things into which the personal fancy might more freely enter, such as household furniture, ornament, bric-a-brac. But personal fancy seemed never to enter into it at all. Money came before desire had emerged, and the joy of getting was in counting the cost of what you got. To the ten thousand newly enriched citizens of Thompsontown one thing was literally as good as another, and divergent prices had to be invented as the only means of telling things apart.

The Expensive School of Architecture

THIS had always been something of a difficulty in Thompsontown and the city itself is really the result, of this embarrassment. People who were not utterly distracted as to what to do with their money would never have built it as they did. The public buildings were all put up for about $500,000 apiece, and for no other imaginable motive. The richer you got the less you cared what, in an architectural way, happened to you, so long as it was a good deal. If a multi-millionaire, you let them build you anything, provided it was big enough, and they usually decided on an orphan asylum with a front door like a valentine.

All Main Street was built up by well-to-do people who had not the slightest personal inclination as to the sort of places they wanted to live in. Its domestic architecture is a sincere and adequate expression of that frame of mind. There is not a house in Main Street that does not assert emphatically the owner's sentiment: What does it matter where I am? —and there is really no reason for preferring any house to any other, aside from the price. Cost in Thompsontown has always been the true key to the nature of things.

Now these thousands of people in Thompsontown have made money merely because they did not break off habits which, perhaps, after all, they could not have broken off. People with shops in State Street became rich just because they did not close their shops in State Street. Fortune favoured every dealer just because he did not cease to deal. They did not seize an opportunity; they merely waited to be seized by it; and while there were exceptions, it is safe to say in general that the new wealth of Thompsontown was the reward for going where you usually went and sitting there.

Then came the problem of spending it.

They bought automobiles, of course, two or three at a time apparently, and they paid sixty dollars for silk shirts, and forty dollars for shoes, and the women wore things in the street that made even them uncomfortable, and State Street became in several ways the equal of Fifth Avenue. You stood an equally good chance of being killed by an equally good motor-car, there was as much inconvenience in getting about, and the noises were almost identical. There was nothing gay or high-flying about it, but you cannot blame them for that. Spectacular spending has always been exaggerated. Outside print, the madder prodigalities are hard to find. They occur, doubtless, but you do not see them. People who buy ten thousand dollar tooth picks, do it by stealth. God sees, and Mr. Upton Sinclair—but not the rest of us.

Monte Cristo in Thompsontown

BUT nobody seemed to be doing with, his money anything that he particularly wanted to do. Nobody ever showed an eccentricity. Nobody could be said in any sense to be having his fling, and while the newly enriched have not the abandon anywhere that you expect of them, in Thompsontown they are particularly tied down. Not only has there never been anything to fling to in Thompsontown, but there have never been the sort of people who could fling. Monte Cristo would go in a limousine to the Men's Forum of the Central Baptists in Thompsontown; Heliogabalus would buy a thousand-dollar overcoat; and each would do it not by way of preliminary indulgence, but after exhausting every other joy. Double their fortunes and they would go in two limousines to the Men's Forum of the Central Baptists and buy two-thousanddollar overcoats.

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POLITICAL economy has not a word of sense to say to such phenomena as the newly rich of Thompsontown. The price of things is not the consequence of a desire; the price of things is the cause of it. What becomes of the law of supply and demand when applied to the front parlors of Maple Street? If you charged enough for bunches of bananas, you would see a bunch of bananas in the front window of every house on Maple Street. You will find anything in a house on Maple Street, if it costs enough; and that is the only reason why you find it there. You cannot account for these things in the manner of economists; it is absurd to suppose that anybody wanted them.

But, in saying that the new wealth is not the result of enterprise, I do not mean that Thompsontown is unenterprising or from a practical point of view a backward place. On the contrary, it is famous for its business energy. If I were Walt Whitman I could sing as well in Thompsontown as on Brooklyn Bridge. I could sing all day of hats and corset-covers, of shoes, nails, leadpipe, soap, and gas-fixtures, regarded as symbolic lumps of its mighty will. Nor do I mean anything invidious in respect to progress.

In public spirit, Thompsontown has caught up to Syracuse, and it has surpassed, I believe, Zenobia, Esopus, Rome, Thebes, Ephesus, Priapus, every city in that part of the State. Community song, community bath-tubs, community churches, public teas, talk, and chicken-dinners, welfare works, public outdoor movements if you want to go outdoors, public indoor classes if you want to stay inside; helping hands held out so thick that it is impossible to slip between them—there never was a better town to lose a leg in or in which to be saved from a life of shame. Thompsontown is filled with public spirit almost as soon as the spirit is made public, no matter what it is. A headline carried for eight days by the

better sort of newspapers becomes an institution there.

No sooner had the new patriotism been invented—I mean the kind that would hang Thomas Jefferson to a sour apple tree—than the clergy of Thompsontown were solid to a man for the deportation of anybody that it occurred toanybody to deport; and the whole town became so safe and sane that it would have brained an anarchist before it knew he was one. It would be a madman who complained that Thompsontown did not, in a public way, keep abreast of things.

But private spirit does seem somewhat lacking in Thompsontown. Citizens of it are magnificent in groups, but, detach the individual from his group and he loses color—like a fish scale. And the lack of personal difference makes it hard to imagine a personal preference, and as you meet rich people singly you lose respect for the rights of property and the laws of the land. Robbing them does not seem like robbery; it seems like rescue; it is impossible to think they want their awful things. Pillage seems rather attractive. You could not hate a Hun who plundered Main Street, though you might wonder at him. If a bomb fell anywhere, it would do a lot of good. That is the trouble with looking at the new wealth of Thompsontown; it makes you a reckless man. It is impossible to avoid the reflection that even with a soviet in the City Hall and the whole town living in phalansteries and the dullest Utopia ever dreamed of come to pass, there could, after all, be no diminution of those personal diversities which present day society is said to keep alive—varieties of art and mental interest, individual expression, fancy, freedom of view, idiosyncrasy—and no danger at all of the dead level dreaded by the orthodox.

For the personal diversities do not exist and the level could not possibly be deader.