Behind the Mirrors Part 8

To get down to names. Many business men entered the service of the government during the war. Almost none of them left it with enhanced reputations. Mr. Frank A. Vanderlip, who served in the Treasury Department, had little success, so the men who surrounded him felt. I am not able to a.s.sess the causes of his failure. Perhaps he had a.s.signed to him an impossible task.

Similarly men who had contact with him while financing the Republican campaign of 1916 were disappointed. After his service at Washington he ceased to be head of a great Wall Street bank. What do these adverse circ.u.mstances mean regarding Mr. Vanderlip's fitness to be, let us say, Secretary of the Treasury? Precisely nothing, let us admit. And his success for a number of years in banking, the large fortune he acc.u.mulated, by the same reasoning, mean no more.

Mr. Vanderlip is one of our best known business men, yet what the public knows about him is nothing. He was the president of a great bank and ama.s.sed wealth. An old financial journalist, he has gift of speech and writing, unusual in the business world. His agreeable personality made him liked by editors. He achieved unusual publicity. Was his reputation solidly based or was it newspaper made? The public does not know, cannot know. I use his case by way of ill.u.s.tration. Perhaps he ought to be President of the United States. But choosing a man for office on the basis of his business success, even so well known a man as Mr.

Vanderlip, is plainly enough blind gambling.

We have in office now one of the great business men of the country. Mr.

Andrew W. Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury, who is posed somewhat uneasily upon what is, many say, the highest pile of wealth any one has ever heaped up, except Mr. John D. Rockefeller. I say "somewhat uneasily" because I have in mind Mr. Mellon emerging from a Congressional hearing at the Capitol, fl.u.s.tered and uncomfortable, turning to a subordinate and asking anxiously, "Well, did I make a good impression?" What could a subordinate reply except, "Yes, Mr. Mellon, you did very well."?

But Mr. Mellon does not make a good impression on the witness stand. If he were unjustly accused of a crime he would hang himself by appearing in his own defense, unless the jury sensed in his stammering hesitancy not guilt but an honest inability to express himself.

Mr. Mellon is the shyest and most awkward man who ever rose to power. He is unhappy before Congressional committees, before reporters in the dreadful conferences which are the outward and visible evidence of our democracy, at Cabinet meetings, where the fluent Mr. Hughes casts him terribly in the shade.

At one such meeting the President dragged him forth from silence by turning to him and asking him, "What has the Sphinx here got to say on the subject." Thus impelled, the Secretary of the Treasury replied, unconsciously in the words of Sir Roger de Coverley, "Well, Mr.

President, I think there is a good deal to be said on both sides."

If we may believe the psychologists, the great object of acquiring wealth and power is the achievement of self-complacency. If it is, Mr.

Mellon has somehow missed it. You can not imagine him writing himself down beside the others in the great American copy book and saying seriously to the youth of the land, "Look at me, I worked always fifteen minutes after the whistle blew and behold the result. Follow my footsteps." No golden words issue from his mouth. Some unforgetable personal measure of his own deserts, some standard peculiar to himself, perhaps, refuses to be buried under the vast acc.u.mulations.

Were ever great abilities so tongue-tied as this? I ask this question not to answer it. I merely hold Mr. Mellon up as the usually insoluble riddle, the why of great business success. But granting that the real Mr. Mellon is shown in the enormous fortune and not in the timid asking of a subordinate, "Did I make a good impression?" does such shrinking, such ill adaptation, on the stage of public life make a contribution to the unending drama of self-government?

[Ill.u.s.tration: ANDREW W. MELLON, SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY]

I take it that behind these footlights which we call Washington, just as behind the literal footlights, the actors, if there is to be any lifting of us up, must play a part with which we can identify ourselves in our imagination. He must be articulate. He must get across. Mr. Harding does it admirably. You watch him and you realize that he is the oldest of stage heroes, Everyman. You say to yourself unconsciously, "Only the accident of seven million majority separates him from me." You are lifted up. Ordinary flesh and blood can do this great thing.

Based on this desire to identify ourselves with greatness is our familiar aphorism, "The office makes the man." All that is necessary is the office to "make" the least of us.

Roosevelt played the part even better than Mr. Harding, "an ordinary man raised to the nth power." He strutted to fill the eye. He was the consummation of articulateness. The point is that self-government must be dramatic or it does not carry along the self-governors.

Of course one must not overlook the fact that "the great silent man" is a consolation to common inarticulateness and ineffectiveness, the general belief that where there is a slow tongue profundity is found being one of those pleasant things which we like to think about ourselves--"we could and we would." But after all there is a sense of pity about our kind attribution of hidden power to dullness. We are half aware that we are compensating.

Anyway, even if the great business man is at home upon the stage, which Mr. Mellon is not, the calling of him to office interrupts the drama of self-government. We admit our failure and call in the G.o.ds from another world. It is as I have said a staged receivership. We can not identify ourselves with the hero. We are poor worms, not millionaires. We might have the seven million majority but we could not also stand upon a pile of seven million gold dollars. Government ceases to be human. It becomes superhuman. And self-government must be human.

Of course, I exaggerate. Mr. Mellon coming from that other world is not wholly without his human relations. I have alluded to his symbolizing the wish-fulfilment of the inarticulate, and the inarticulate are many.

He does more. He fits admirably into what Mr. Walter Lippmann has called in his new book one of our popular stereotypes. We demand a conflict between reality and the stage. We like to see the masks pulled off our actors. One of our best received traditions is that a man who has a fight with the politicians has performed a great service. We like to see our strutters strut in a little fear of us.

But Secretary Mellon's defeat of Representative Fordney, Senator Elkins, and Elmer Dover in their efforts to fill his department with politicians was not so much a sign of power as a measure of the difference between Mr. Mellon's world and theirs.

Mr. Mellon comes into the Treasury from his bank. All he knows is banking, not politics. If he went from the Mellon Bank to the National City Bank of New York he would not discharge all the National City Bank employees and bring in a lot of men who had never seen the inside of a bank before, whom he did not know, who didn't speak the same language that he did. It is only in politics that one finds such perfect faith in man as man.

He goes to one young Democrat in the Department--this actually happened--and he says, "Young man, I like your work. I want you to stay with me," "Ah, but, Mr. Mellon, I can't," plead this Democrat, "You really can't do things that way. It is not done. You will have all the Republican politicians about your ears."

But it was not a sense of power in Mr. Mellon that made him thus defy the conventions. It was merely the instinct of self-protection. He could not live in the atmosphere of politics. He had to do things as he always had done them. The G.o.ds coming down from high Olympus among the sons and daughters of men were probably never as much at ease as the Greeks made them out to be.

With his millions behind him Mr. Mellon was a solid object in his conflict with the politicians. Without them one does not know what would have happened between him and Mr. Fordney, Mr. Elkins, and Mr. Dover.

What is a good Secretary of the Treasury? We have a stereotype about that, too, one slowly and painfully formed. A good Secretary of the Treasury is one who has seen the inside of a bank, who has read the books on finance and knows the rules. Originally our Secretaries of the Treasury were amateurs, like our generals who beat ploughshares into swords. When one got into trouble, he boarded the Congressional Limited for New York and saw Mr. Morgan. Mr. Morgan came out of his bank holding the safety of the nation in his hands, exhibiting it to reporters who wrote all about it, a.s.suring the public.

At length it was decided to keep the safety of the nation at Washington.

And our Secretaries of the Treasury tended to become professional. The young men who tell us whether we have a good Secretary of the Treasury or not are the financial writers of the newspapers. The Secretary acts.

The young men look in the books and see that he has conformed to the rules. When he has he leaves nothing to be desired as Secretary.

Mr. Mellon's relation to Alexander Hamilton is the same as Marshal Foch's relation to Napoleon; one knew war from his own head, the other knows it from the teachers. Mr. Mellon's administration is not inspired.

In the greatest financial crisis in our history he has no constructive suggestion to make. You would hardly know that Secretary Houston was gone and Mr. Mellon had come. And there is an explanation for this continuity, beside that of the rule books. The hard work of the Department has been done under both administrations by a.s.sistant Secretary S. P. Gilbert, for Mr. Mellon has the successful man's habit of leaning heavily upon an able and industrious subordinate. Mr. Gilbert is an ambitious young lawyer who has mastered the books and who works 18 hours a day. The voice is the voice of Mellon but the hand is the hand of Gilbert.

I have a.n.a.lyzed Mr. Mellon at Washington although only a small fraction of his career is involved and although he operates in the difficult circ.u.mstances of an unknown and unfavorable environment. But he is perceptible in Washington, he does appear before Congressional Committees and at newspaper conferences. You can study the Gilberts who surround him. You can estimate the prepossessions that enter into our judgment of him. You can measure him against the standard of public life.

In Pittsburg he is more remote. He is hedged about with the secrecy of business. He is to be seen only through the golden aura of a great fortune, sitting shy and awkward upon an eminence, the product of forces and personalities which can only be guessed at.

He was the son of a banker and inherited a considerable fortune. He operated in a city which expanded fabulously in the course of his lifetime. If he is shy and unbusiness-worldly, he has a brother who has that force of personality which we usually a.s.sociate with fitness for life. His bank was the chosen instrument of Henry C. Frick, one of the pioneer demiG.o.ds, who could make the business reputations of men who proved adaptable to his uses.

Thus into the result there enters the power of Frick, the thrust upward of Pittsburg, an industrial volcano, the a.s.sociated personality of the other Mellon. You have to give a name to all this combination of favoring circ.u.mstances and favoring personalities and names are usually given arbitrarily. The name given in this case is Andrew W. Mellon. But how much of it is Andrew W. Mellon and how much of it is Pittsburg, how much of it Frick, how much of it brother Mellon, an electorate seeking a business man for office can not stop to inquire and can not learn if it does inquire.

If the people elect a man like Mr. Mellon to office they do not enlist in the public service the combination of persons and forces which is known by his name. Or if he is all that he seems to be, measured by his great fortune, perhaps they get him after he has spent his force or after his head is turned by success, or at any rate they put him into an unfamiliar milieu and subject him to that corrupting temptation, the desire for a second term or for a higher office.

And to go back to what I have said before, they make self-government go into bankruptcy and ask for a receiver.

The great business-man President is just a romantic development of the great business-man illusion.

CHAPTER VII

THE BOTTLE NECK OF THE CABINET, AND WHAT IS IN THE BOTTLE

Mr. Mellon's a.s.sociates in the Cabinet were most of them chosen on substantially the same principles as he was, namely, that success in business or professional life implies fitness for public life. We have no other standard. The present Cabinet is an "exceptionally good"

Cabinet. Many of its members are millionaires.

Some of them owe their place to the rule that those who help elect a President are ent.i.tled to the honor, the advertising, or the "vindication," of high public office.

That is to say, the same considerations that rule in the selection of Senators rule in their selection. They were recruited from the cla.s.s from which Senators are recruited. I can not say the mental level of the Cabinet is above that of the Senate. Take out of the upper house its two strongest members, its two weakest, and half a dozen of the average sort, and you construct a body in every way equal to the Cabinet of Mr.

Harding in intelligence and public morals.

Most of them, never having been members of the upper house, have not suffered from the depreciation in the public eye which attends service in the legislative branch. They come rather from the wonderful business world.

There are, moreover, few of them compared to Senators. Smallness of numbers suggests careful selection, superior qualifications.

And the secrecy of Cabinet meetings makes them impressive. If reporters were present, the public would realize that the Cabinet as a Cabinet was mostly occupied with little things.

The records prove it.

The biweekly meetings of the Cabinet are commonly followed by the announcement: "The Cabinet had a short session today. Nothing of importance was discussed"; or, "Details of administration were discussed." Now, of course, reasons of state may occasionally restrain the disclosure of what actually was the subject before the Cabinet. Yet Mr. Harding's administration has been in office more than a year, and how many important policies has it adopted? How much wisdom has emerged from the biweekly meetings?

Sample announcements of the Cabinet meetings run like this: "The Cabinet listened to the Postmaster General, explaining how much it would facilitate the handling of the mails if people would distribute the mailing of their letters throughout the day, instead of keeping most of them to mail late in the afternoon when they are leaving their offices.

The Postmaster General pointed out that the government departments were offenders in this respect." Useful; but why should the whole nation worry about who advises with the President over the inveterate bad habits of the people as letter writers?