Windy McPherson's Son

The story of Sam’s life there in Chicago for the next several years ceases to be the story of a man and becomes the story of a type, a crowd, a gang.  What he and the group of men surrounding him and making money with him did in Chicago, other men and other groups of men have done in New York, in Paris, in London.  Coming into power with the great expansive wave of prosperity that attended the first McKinley administration, these men went mad of money making.  They played with great industrial institutions and railroad systems like excited children, and a man of Chicago won the notice and something of the admiration of the world by his willingness to bet a million dollars on the turn of the weather.  In the years of criticism and readjustment that followed this period of sporadic growth, writers have told with great clearness how the thing was done, and some of the participants, captains of industry turned penmen, Caesars become ink-slingers, have bruited the story to an admiring world.

Given the time, the inclination, the power of the press, and the unscrupulousness, the thing that Sam McPherson and his followers did in Chicago in not difficult.  Advised by Webster and the talented Prince and Morrison to handle his publicity work, he rapidly unloaded his huge holdings of common stock upon an eager public, keeping for himself the bonds which he hypothecated at the banks to increase his working capital while continuing to control the company.  When the common stock was unloaded, he, with a group of fellow spirits, began an attack upon it through the stock market and in the press, and bought it again at a low figure, holding it ready to unload when the public should have forgotten.

The annual advertising expenditure of the firearms trust ran into millions and Sam’s hold upon the press of the country was almost unbelievably strong.  Morrison rapidly developed unusual daring and audacity in using this instrument and making it serve Sam’s ends.  He suppressed facts, created illusions, and used the newspapers as a whip to crack at the heels of congressmen, senators, and legislators, of the various states, when such matters as appropriation for firearms came before them.

And Sam, who had undertaken the consolidation of the firearms companies, having a dream of himself as a great master in that field, a sort of American Krupp, rapidly awoke from the dream to take the bigger chances for gain in the world of speculation.  Within a year he dropped Edwards as head of the firearms trust and in his place put Lewis, with Morrison as secretary and manager of sales.  Guided by Sam these two, like the little drygoods merchant of the old Rainey Company, went from capital to capital and from city to city making contracts, influencing news, placing advertising contracts where they would do the most good, fixing men.

And in the meantime Sam, with Webster, a banker named Crofts who had profited largely in the firearms merger, and sometimes Morrison or Prince, began a series of stock raids, speculations, and manipulations that attracted country-wide attention, and became known to the newspaper reading world as the McPherson Chicago crowd.  They were in oil, railroads, coal, western land, mining, timber, and street railways.  One summer Sam, with Prince, built, ran to a profit, and sold to advantage a huge amusement park.  Through his head day after day marched columns of figures, ideas, schemes, more and more spectacular opportunities for gain.  Some of the enterprises in which he engaged, while because of their size they seemed more dignified, were of reality of a type with the game smuggling of his South Water Street days, and in all of his operations it was his old instinct for bargains and for the finding of buyers together with Webster’s ability for carrying through questionable deals that made him and his followers almost constantly successful in the face of opposition from the more conservative business and financial men of the city.

Again Sam led a new life, owning running horses at the tracks, memberships in many clubs, a country house in Wisconsin, and shooting preserves in Texas.  He drank steadily, played poker for big stakes, kept in the public prints, and day after day led his crew upon the high seas of finance.  He did not dare think and in his heart he was sick of it.  Sick to the soul, so that when thought came to him he got out of his bed to seek roistering companions or, getting pen and paper, sat for hours figuring out new and more daring schemes for money making.  The great forward movement in modern industry of which he had dreamed of being a part had for him turned out to be a huge meaningless gamble with loaded dice against a credulous public.  With his followers he went on day after day doing deeds without thought.  Industries were organised and launched, men employed and thrown out of employment, towns wrecked by the destruction of an industry and other towns made by the building of other industries.  At a whim of his a thousand men began building a city on an Indiana sand hill, and at a wave of his hand another thousand men of an Indiana town sold their homes, with the chicken houses in the back-yards and vines trained by the kitchen doors, and rushed to buy sections of the hill plotted off for them.  He did not stop to discuss with his followers the meaning of the things he did.  He told them of the profits to be made and then, having done the thing, he went with them to drink in bar rooms and to spend the evening or afternoon singing songs, visiting his stable of runners or, more often, sitting silently about the card table playing for high stakes.  Making millions through the manipulation of the public during the day, he sometimes sat half the night struggling with his companions for the possession of thousands.

Lewis, the Jew, the only one of Sam’s companions who had not followed him in his spectacular money making, stayed in the office of the firearms company and ran it like the scientific able man of business he was.  While Sam remained chairman of the board of the company and had an office, a desk, and the name of leadership there, he let Lewis run the place, and spent his own time upon the stock exchange or in some corner with Webster and Crofts planning some new money making raid.

“You have the better of it, Lewis,” he said one day in a reflective mood; “you thought I had cut the ground from under you when I got Tom Edwards, but I only set you more firmly in a larger place.”

He made a movement with his hand toward the large general offices with the rows of busy clerks and the substantial look of work being done.

“I might have had the work you are doing.  I planned and schemed with that end in view,” he added, lighting a cigar and going out at the door.

“And the money hunger got you,” laughed Lewis, looking after him, “the hunger that gets Jews and Gentiles and all who feed it.”

One might have come upon the McPherson Chicago crowd about the old Chicago stock exchange on any day during those years, Crofts, tall, abrupt, and dogmatic; Morrison, slender, dandified, and gracious; Webster, well-dressed, suave, gentlemanly, and Sam, silent, restless, and often morose and ugly.  Sometimes it seemed to Sam that they were all unreal, himself and the men with him.  He watched his companions cunningly.  They were constantly posing before the passing crowd of brokers and small speculators.  Webster, coming up to him on the floor of the exchange, would tell him of a snowstorm raging outside with the air of a man parting with a long-cherished secret.  His companions went from one to the other vowing eternal friendships, and then, keeping spies upon each other, they hurried to Sam with tales of secret betrayals.  Into any deal proposed by him they went eagerly, although sometimes fearfully, and almost always they won.  And with Sam they made millions through the manipulation of the firearms company, and the Chicago and Northern Lake Railroad which he controlled.

In later years Sam looked back upon it all as a kind of nightmare.  It seemed to him that never during that period had he lived or thought sanely.  The great financial leaders that he saw were not, he thought, great men.  Some of them, like Webster, were masters of craft, or, like Morrison, of words, but for the most part they were but shrewd, greedy vultures feeding upon the public or upon each other.

In the meantime Sam was rapidly degenerating.  His paunch became distended, and his hands trembled in the morning.  Being a man of strong appetites, and having a determination to avoid women, he almost constantly overdrank and overate, and in the leisure hours that came to him he hurried eagerly from place to place, avoiding thought, avoiding sane quiet talk, avoiding himself.

All of his companions did not suffer equally.  Webster seemed made for the life, thriving and expanding under it, putting his winnings steadily aside, going on Sunday to a suburban church, avoiding the publicity connecting his name with race horses and big sporting events that Crofts sought and to which Sam submitted.  One day Sam and Crofts caught him in an effort to sell them out to a group of New York bankers in a mining deal and turned the trick on him instead, whereupon he went off to New York to become a respectable big business man and the friend of senators and philanthropists.

Crofts was a man with chronic domestic troubles, one of those men who begin each day by cursing their wives before their associates and yet continue living with them year after year.  There was a kind of rough squareness in the man, and after the completion of a successful deal he would be as happy as a boy, pounding men on the back, shaking with laughter, throwing money about, making crude jokes.  After Sam left Chicago he finally divorced his wife and married an actress from the vaudeville stage and after losing two-thirds of his fortune in an effort to capture control of a southern railroad, went to England and, coached by the actress wife, developed into an English country gentleman.

And Sam was a man sick.  Day after day he went on drinking more and more heavily, playing for bigger and bigger stakes, allowing himself less and less thought of himself.  One day he received a long letter from John Telfer telling of the sudden death of Mary Underwood and berating him for his neglect of her.

“She was ill for a year and without an income,” wrote Telfer.  Sam noticed that the man’s hand had begun to tremble.  “She lied to me and told me you had sent her money, but now that she is dead I find that though she wrote you she got no answer.  Her old aunt told me.”

Sam put the letter into his pocket and going into one of his clubs began drinking with a crowd of men he found idling there.  He had paid little attention to his correspondence for months.  No doubt the letter from Mary had been received by his secretary and thrown aside with the letters of thousands of other women, begging letters, amorous letters, letters directed at him because of his wealth and the prominence given his exploits by the newspapers.

After wiring an explanation and mailing a check the size of which filled John Telfer with admiration, Sam with a half dozen fellow roisterers spent the late afternoon and evening going from saloon to saloon through the south side.  When he got to his apartments late that night, his head was reeling and his mind filled with distorted memories of drinking men and women and of himself standing on a table in some obscure drinking place and calling upon the shouting, laughing hangers-on of his crowd of rich money spenders to think and to work and to seek Truth.

He went to sleep in his chair, his mind filled with the dancing faces of dead women, Mary Underwood and Janet and Sue, tear-stained faces calling to him.  When he awoke and shaved he went out into the street and to another down-town club.

“I wonder if Sue is dead, too,” he muttered, remembering his dream.

At the club he was called to the telephone by Lewis, who asked him to come at once to his office at the Edwards Consolidated.  When he got there he found a wire from Sue.  In a moment of loneliness and despondency over the loss of his old business standing and reputation, Colonel Tom had shot himself in a New York hotel.

Sam sat at his desk, fingering the yellow paper lying before him and fighting to get his head clear.

“The old coward.  The damned old coward,” he muttered; “any one could have done that.”

When Lewis came into Sam’s office he found his chief sitting at his desk fingering the telegram and muttering to himself.  When Sam handed him the wire he came around and stood beside Sam, his hand upon his shoulder.

“Well, do not blame yourself for that,” he said, with quick understanding.

“I don’t,” Sam muttered; “I do not blame myself for anything.  I am a result, not a cause.  I am trying to think.  I am not through yet.  I am going to begin again when I get things thought out.”

Lewis went out of the room leaving him to his thoughts.  For an hour he sat there reviewing his life.  When he came to the day that he had humiliated Colonel Tom, there came back to his mind the sentence he had written on the sheet of paper while the vote was being counted.  “The best men spend their lives seeking truth.”

Suddenly he came to a decision and, calling Lewis, began laying out a plan of action.  His head cleared and the ring came back into his voice.  To Lewis he gave an option on his entire holdings of Edwards Consolidated stocks and bonds and to him also he entrusted the clearing up of deal after deal in which he was interested.  Then, calling a broker, he began throwing a mass of stock on the market.  When Lewis told him that Crofts was ’phoning wildly about town to find him, and was with the help of another banker supporting the market and taking Sam’s stocks as fast as offered, he laughed and giving Lewis instructions regarding the disposal of his monies walked out of the office, again a free man and again seeking the answer to his problem.

He made no attempt to answer Sue’s wire.  He was restless to get at something he had in his mind.  He went to his apartments and packed a bag and from there disappeared saying goodbye to no one.  In his mind was no definite idea of where he was going or what he was going to do.  He knew only that he would follow the message his hand had written.  He would try to spend his life seeking truth.