Business and the Literati
For as long as the
culture of business has been an integral part of American life, it has also
been frowned upon by important sectors of our society. Among our intellectuals
especially, the business world has been the subject of many brutal caricatures,
portraying corporations large and small, and the people who run them, as
heartless, soulless agents of greed. These caricatures have shaped our implicit
understanding of the nature of the business world, so much that they have come
to pass for conventional wisdom.
In recent years, one of the clearest expressions of
the reigning caricature was that offered by the commencement speaker who
addressed the graduating class of Arizona State University in May 2009. Warning
the students away from what he described as the familiar American formula for
success, the speaker put forward what he took to be the ethic of the business
world:
You're taught to chase after all the usual brass
rings; you try to be on this "who's who" list or that top 100 list;
you chase after the big money and you figure out how big your corner office is;
you worry about whether you have a fancy enough title or a fancy enough car.
That's the message that's sent each and every day, or has been in our culture
for far too long — that through material possessions, through a ruthless
competition pursued only on your own behalf — that's how you will measure
success. Now, you can take that road — and it may work for some. But at this
critical juncture in our nation's history, at this difficult time, let me suggest
that such an approach won't get you where you want to go; it displays a poverty
of ambition.
As it happens, those words were spoken by the
president of the United States, Barack Obama. But they could easily have been
uttered by almost anyone with his education and intellectual pedigree. Those
words convey an image that the architects of our elite culture's
self-understanding — especially America's foremost authors and playwrights, who
do a great deal to shape the way that other intellectuals, and Americans in
general, think about our country — have long labored to construct.
The business of America may be business, but the
business of American literature in the past century has been largely to insist
that the nation is, in pursuing business, wasting itself on unworthy objects.
In the eyes of most novelists and playwrights who deal with the subject,
business is not an honorable vocation, but rather an obsessive scramble for
lucre and status. Tycoons are plunderers. Salesmen are poor slobs truckling to their
bosses, though most of them aspire to be cormorants and highwaymen, too. The
mass desire to strike it rich has launched a forced march to nowhere. In short,
American literature hates American business for what it has done to the souls
of the rich, the poor, and the middling alike.
Right-thinking people now take it for granted that, in
criticizing business, American literature has saved (or at least elevated) the
nation's soul. But after a century of slander, that assumption needs
revisiting. In so doing, it is worth examining the process through which our
literati have framed the way we think about capitalism, and especially those
who practice it. How did our culture come to hold the image of the businessman
that it now does? Which literary works and authors have had done the most to
shape that (mostly negative) image? And in this casting of the entrepreneur as
villain in America's morality tale, which culture has been exposed as more
corrupt — that of American business, or American letters?
RAKING THE MUCK
Boodle, graft, scam, gyp, hustle, hoodwink, chisel, flim-flam, chicanery, rake-off, skullduggery, swindle:
Our language has a rich and evocative technical vocabulary for snake-bellied
business dealing and the government malfeasance that is its indispensable
servant. And beside the distinguished native tradition of underhandedness runs
a counter-tradition of moral outrage and attempted reform, which emerged with
force just as the culture of business was peaking at the turn of the 20thcentury.
In The Shame of the Cities (1904), Lincoln Steffens — dean of the
muckrakers, the vanguard of investigative journalists who early in the 20th century
drew the public's attention to the filthier aspects of our national life —
pronounced all Americans complicit in sin: "We break our own laws and rob
our own government, the lady at the custom-house, the lyncher with his rope,
and the captain of industry with his bribe and his rebate. The spirit of graft
and of lawlessness is the American spirit."
Soon after, Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906) became the most celebrated muckraking work of its time; a
century later, it is the only one still widely read. The story relates the
brutal suffering of a Lithuanian immigrant meat-packer in Chicago, and sickened
the country with indignation at the execrable manner in which food was
processed. Nauseating the readership had practical benefits: President Theodore
Roosevelt's admiration for the novel — qualified by his distaste for Sinclair's
socialism — issued in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat
Inspection Amendment the same year as The Jungle's release.
Sinclair's socialist loathing for the capitalist
oppressors thunders through the novel. Here a speaker who will inspire the
downtrodden hero to join the Socialist Party roars at the prevailing injustice:
There are a thousand [in Chicago] — ten thousand,
maybe — who are the masters of these slaves, who own their toil. They do
nothing to earn what they receive, they do not even have to ask for it — it
comes to them of itself, their only care is to dispose of it. They live in
palaces, they riot in luxury and extravagance — such as no words can describe,
as makes the imagination reel and stagger, makes the soul grow sick and faint.
They spend hundreds of dollars for a pair of shoes, a handkerchief, a garter;
they spend millions for horses and automobiles and yachts, for palaces and banquets,
for little shiny stones with which to deck their bodies. Their life is a
contest among themselves in ostentation and recklessness . . . .
Thorstein Veblen, whose Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) provided the muckrakers with an abstract
sociological foundation, lamented with a characteristically dry eye that vice
does a man more good than virtue if he wants to get on in the world:
"Freedom from scruple, from sympathy, honesty, and regard for life, may,
within fairly wide limits, be said to further the success of the individual in
the pecuniary culture." From Veblen, whom he read with "a continuous
ebullition of glee," Sinclair learned the shame of conspicuous
consumption: Lives wasted in profligate expenditure never appear more repulsive
than through Sinclair's eyes. His novel The Metropolis (1908) is a 200-page catalogue of exorbitant self-indulgence by the
wealthiest people in New York. Preposterous extravagance and pretensions to
gentility constitute the obverse of tearing wolfishness; persons of savage
appetite bare their teeth when denied their rightful pleasures. In The Moneychangers (1908), a priapic 80-year-old banker — the most powerful man on Wall
Street — destroys his sexual rival and the young woman he wants, and brings on
a nationwide depression in the process, just to teach the rabble to fear their
masters. Sinclair's villains are peerless in their malignancy.
