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[Illustration: THOMAS W. LAWSON AFTER TWELVE MONTHS OF "FRENZIED
FINANCE"]

FRENZIED FINANCE

BY

THOMAS W. LAWSON

OF BOSTON

VOLUME I

THE CRIME OF AMALGAMATED


NEW YORK
THE RIDGWAY-THAYER COMPANY
1905


_Copyright, 1905, by_
THE RIDGWAY-THAYER COMPANY

_These articles are reprinted from "Everybody's Magazine"_

COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY THE RIDGWAY-THAYER COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY THE RIDGWAY-THAYER COMPANY

_All rights reserved_

TROW DIRECTORY
PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY
NEW YORK




TO

PENITENCE AND PUNISHMENT

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

TO PENITENCE: that those whose deviltry is exposed within its pages may
see in a true light the wrongs they have wrought--and repent.

TO PUNISHMENT: that the unpenalized crimes of which it is the chronicle
may appear in such hideousness to the world as forever to disgrace their
perpetrators.

TO PENITENCE: that the transgressors, learning the error of their ways,
may reform.

TO PUNISHMENT: that the sins of the century crying to heaven for
vengeance may on earth be visited with condemnation stern enough to halt
greed at the kill.

TO PUNISHMENT: that public indignation may be so aroused against the
practices of high finance that it shall come to be as culpable to graft
and cozen within the law as it is lawless to-day to counterfeit and
steal.

TO PENITENCE: that in the minds of all who read this eventful history
there may grow up a knowledge and a conviction that the gaining of vast
wealth is not worth the sacrifice of manhood, and that poverty and
abstinence with honor are better worth having than millions and luxury
at the cost of candor and rectitude.




TO MY AUDIENCE

SAINTS, SINNERS, AND IN-BETWEENS


Before you enter the confines of "Frenzied Finance," here spread
out--for your inspection, at least; enlightenment, perhaps--halt one
brief moment. If the men and things to be encountered within are
real--did live or live now--you must deal with them one way. If these
embodiments are but figments of my mind and pen, you must regard them
from a different view-point. Therefore, before turning the page, it
behooves you to find for yourself an answer to the grave question:

Is it the truth that is dealt with here? In weighing the evidence
remember:

My profession is business. My writing is an incident. "Frenzied Finance"
was set down during the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth hours of busy
days. I pass it up as the history of affairs of which I was a part. The
men who move within the book's pages are still on the turf. A period of
twelve years is covered. So far, eighteen instalments, in all some
400,000 words, have been published. The spigot is still running. I have
written from memory, necessarily. While it is true that fiction is
expressed in the same forms and phrases as truth, no man ever lived who
could shape 400,000 words into the kinds of pictures I have painted and
pass them off for aught but what they were. The character of my palette
made it mechanically impossible to shade or temper the pigments, for the
story was written in instalments, and circumstances were such that often
one month's issue was out to the public before the next instalment was
on paper. Considering all this, the consistency of the chronicle as it
stands is the best evidence of its truth. In submitting it to my readers
I desire to reiterate:

It _is_ truth--of the kind that carries its own bell and candle. Within
the narrative itself are the reagents required to test and prove its
genuineness. Were man endowed with the propensity of a Muenchhausen, the
cunning of a Machiavelli, the imagination of Scheherezade, the ability
of a Shakespeare, and the hellishness of his Satanic Majesty, he could
not play upon 400,000 words, or one-quarter that number, and make the
play peal truth for a single hour to the audience who will read this
book, or to one-thousandth part the audience that has already read it in
_Everybody's Magazine_.

Such as the story is, it is before you. If in its perusal you fathom my
intentions, my hopes, my desires, I shall have been repaid for the pain
its writing has brought me. At least you will find the history of a
colossal business affair involving millions of dollars and manned by the
financial leaders of the moment. It is a fair representation of
financial methods and commercial morals as they exist in America at the
beginning of the twentieth century. As a contemporary document the
narrative should have value; as history it is not, I believe, without
interest. As a message it has had its influence. Indeed, it is not an
exaggeration to say that no man in his own generation has seen such a
crop come forth from seed of his own sowing since the long bygone days
when the wandering king planted dragons' teeth on the Phoenician plain
and raised up an army of warriors.

Yours very truly
    Thomas W. Lawson




FOREWORD


There will be set down in this book, in as simple and direct a fashion
as I can write it, the story of Amalgamated Copper and of the "System"
of which it is the most flagrant example. This "System" is a process or
a device for the incubation of wealth from the people's savings in the
banks, trust, and insurance companies, and the public funds. Through its
workings during the last twenty years there has grown up in this country
a set of colossal corporations in which unmeasured success and continued
immunity from punishment have bred an insolent disregard of law, of
common morality, and of public and private right, together with a grim
determination to hold on to, at all hazards, the great possessions they
have gulped or captured. It is the same "System" which has taken from
the millions of our people billions of dollars, and given them over to a
score or two of men with power to use and enjoy them as absolutely as
though these billions had been earned dollar by dollar by the labor of
their bodies and minds. Yet in telling the story of Amalgamated, the
most brazen and voracious maw of this "System," I desire it understood
that I take no issue with men; it is with a principle I am concerned.
With the men I have had close and intimate intercourse, and from my
knowledge of the means they have used, and the manner in which they have
used them, and the causes and effects of their performances, I have no
hesitation in stating that the good they have done, the evils they have
created, and the indelible imprints they have made on mankind are the
products of a condition and not of their individualities, and that if
not one of them had ever been born the same good and evil would to-day
exist. Others would have done what they did, and would have to answer
for what has been done, as they must. So I say the men are merely
individuals; the "System" is the thing at fault, and it is the "System"
that must be rectified. Better far for me not to tell the story I am
going to tell; better far for the victims of Amalgamated not to know who
plundered them and how, than to have them know it only to wreak
vengeance on individuals and overlook the "System," which, if allowed to
continue, surely will in time, a short time, destroy the nation by
precipitating fratricidal war.

The enormous losses, millions upon millions--to my personal knowledge
over a hundred millions of dollars--which were made because of
Amalgamated; the large number of suicides--to my personal knowledge over
thirty--which were directly caused by Amalgamated; the large number of
previously reputable citizens who were made prison convicts--to my
personal knowledge over twenty--directly because of Amalgamated, were
caused by acts of this "System" of which Henry H. Rogers and his
immediate associates were the direct administrators; and yet Mr. Rogers
and his immediate associates, while these great wrongs were occurring,
led social lives which, measured by the most rigid yardstick of mental
or moral rectitude, were as near perfect as it is possible for human
lives to be. As husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, friends, they were
ideal, cleanly of body and of mind, with heads filled with sentiment and
hearts filled with sympathies; their personal lives were like their
homes and their gardens--revealing only the brightest things of this
world, the singing, humming, sweet-smelling things which so strongly
speak to us of the other world we are yet to know. As workers in the
world's vineyards, they labored six days and rested upon the Sabbath,
and gave thanks to Him from whom all blessings flow that He allowed
them, His humble creatures, to have their earthly being. And yet these
men, to whose eyes I have seen come the tears for others' sufferings,
and whose voices I have heard grow husky in recounting the woes of their
less fortunate brothers--these men under the spell of the brutal code of
modern dollar-making are converted into beasts of prey, and put to shame
the denizens of the deep which devour their kind that they may live.

In the harness of the "System" these men knew no Sabbath, no Him; they
had no time to offer thanks, no care for earthly or celestial being;
from their eyes no human power could squeeze a tear, no suffering wring
a pang from their hearts. They were immune to every feeling known to God
or man. They knew only dollars. Their relatives of a moment since, their
friends of yesterday and long, long ago, they regarded only as lumps of
matter with which to feed the whirring, grinding, gnashing mill which
poured forth into their bins--dollars.

In telling the story of Amalgamated I hope to have profited by my long
and intimate study of this cruel, tigerishly cruel "System," so as to be
able to deaden myself to all those human sympathies which I have heard
its votaries so many times subordinate to "It's business." I shall try
only to keep before me how the Indians of the forest, as our forefathers
drove them farther and farther into the unknown West, got bitter
consolation out of the oft-chanted precept of their white brethren of
civilization, "An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth," reminding myself
that whatever of misery or unhappiness my story may bring to the few, it
will be as nothing to that which they have brought to the many.

In asking for the serious, earnest consideration of the public, I shall
be honest in giving to it my qualifications, my motives, and my desires
for writing this narrative. For thirty-four years I have been actively
connected with matters financial. As banker, broker, and corporation
man, I have, from the vantage-point of one who actually handled the
things he studied,