Frenzied Finance Part 55

"Mr. Lawson," I said, "there are few who would care to be in your shoes--a rich man waging a war of this sort. The chances are altogether in favor of their smas.h.i.+ng you financially."

"Let them, if they can. There are worse things in this life than being smashed financially."

Mr. Lawson's smile was sunny and confident. He is fearless.

LAWSON, THE MAN

BY JAMES CREELMAN

From the New York _World_, December 12, 1904.

BOSTON, December 10th.

All through the critical business hours of Friday, when Thomas W. Lawson, master spirit in the present extraordinary war against Standard Oil finance in Wall Street, was reported to be locked up with H. H. Rogers, generalissimo of Standard Oil, perfecting the details of a settlement for $6,000,000--all through that anxious time, when the stock-tickers and newspapers of the country were trying to guess the meaning of Mr. Lawson's sudden silence and inaccessibility, he was standing in his quiet room in Young's Hotel, explaining the situation to the public through the _World_.

Although I sat in the room with him almost from the time that the stock-market opened until long after it closed, not once did Mr. Lawson show the slightest sign of excitement over market affairs. Strong as an ox, clear-eyed, tranquil, smiling, the man who had moved the financial market downward against the will of the greatest combination of capital the world has ever seen, bore himself like one absolutely confident of success. The bunch of blue corn-flowers in his b.u.t.ton-hole was not fresher than he, although on the previous day he had fought through one of the greatest battles in the history of speculation, had made an hour-and-a-half speech at a night banquet, had gone to bed after midnight, and risen before five in the morning.

In that one day he had forced nearly 3,000,000 shares of stock into the market in New York.

"My one instrument is publicity," he said. "It is the most powerful weapon in the world. With it I have been able to strike with some of the power which eighty millions of Americans possess when they are wide-awake and in earnest.

"This week's work is only the beginning of a demonstration that the secrecy of the frenzied finance system--under the cover of which the savings of the people gathered into banks, trust inst.i.tutions, and insurance companies, have been used by the Standard Oil crowd to rob the people through the stock-market--cannot succeed against publicity.

The people only need light to save themselves.

"At the beginning of the week I advised the people of the United States to sell Amalgamated Copper and the other pool stocks. It was the first step in the final realization of plans I had been maturing for ten years. Since then, against the whole force of the billions and billions commanded by the Standard Oil system, Amalgamated has dropped from 82 into the 60's. I give the people my word, which I have never yet broken, that not once in that time have I sold a share of Amalgamated stock. Not only that, but I have actually bought large blocks of Amalgamated in order to steady the market and prevent too great and too sudden a panic, so that my friends everywhere might be able to get out without complete ruin. But for that I believe we would have had a panic greater than the Northern Pacific crash.

"I simply went out into the public square and told the people the truth. I was in a position to tell the truth. I knew the methods by which they had been robbed. I knew that ruin was staring them in the face unless they acted quickly.

SPENT $92,000 ADVERTISING

"I advertised the fact over my signature in the newspapers of New York, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles. I cabled the advertis.e.m.e.nt to London. All this cost, with incidental expenses, something like $92,000.

"The frightened leaders and agents of the 'System' spread reports that I was in league with the leading plungers and manipulators of Wall Street, that I was making a mere stock raid, that I was trying to 'shake down' Mr. Rogers. The truth is that I have no partners. Not a soul knew my plans until my first advertis.e.m.e.nt appeared. I have no price, for there can be no peace now until the whole rotten scheme of frenzied finance is smashed and things are brought back to their natural honest level. I am in deadly earnest. No man knows better than I do how great a service I am rendering to the American people."

Mr. Lawson stood squarely upon his heels, the incarnation of strength and courage. The square head, high and wide at the top, the long line of the jaw and broad, fighting chin, big, blue-gray eyes, the big, flat teeth, the strong nose, large firm mouth, sinewy neck, hairy hands, broad, deep chest, powerfully curved thighs, and the steady voice--these were eloquent of strength, determination, and concentration.

There was a black pearl in his cravat and an almost priceless canary-colored diamond sparkling on his little finger. He wore gray, striped trousers and a black coat and vest, across which was a beaded gold watch-chain. Everywhere in his room were flowers, roses, lilies, and bunches of the famous Lawson Pink, the flower for which he once paid $30,000.

The man whom I had expected to find haggard, pale, wild-eyed, and excited, in the centre of a nervous hurricane, was rosy-cheeked, cheerful, and apparently as free from care as though he had never heard of Wall Street.

He spoke rapidly but in an even voice, occasionally pacing the floor and sometimes gesturing or setting his hands firmly on his hips. He answered questions promptly and with an almost boyish appearance of frankness. It would be hard to imagine a more masculine, compact, and concentrated personality.

This is the man who left school in Cambridge at the age of twelve, walked into Boston with his books under his arm, and secured a three-dollar-a-week position as an office-boy almost on the very spot where, after thirty-six years, he has worked himself up into a position from which he feels able to captain the fight against Standard Oil and its allies. He owns a palace in Boston filled with works of art; he has a six-hundred acre farm on Cape Cod, with seven miles of fences, three hundred horses, each one of whom he can call by name; a hundred and fifty dogs, and a building for training his animals larger than Madison Square Garden. Some of his horses are worth many thousands of dollars apiece.

Even the experts of the German Government who examined Dreamwold the other day were amazed at its costliness and perfection. Within forty-eight hours Mr. Lawson wrote and published a large ill.u.s.trated book a.n.a.lyzing his farm and gave it to his German visitors as a souvenir, after organizing for them a horse show that overwhelmed them with surprise.

He built the yacht _Independence_ at a cost of $200,000, and when it was shut out from the America's Cup race smilingly threw it on the sc.r.a.p heap. He established a great racing stable, and when tired of playing with it, broke it up. He went to Kentucky, and the day before a great trotting race bought Boralma for $17,000. His pride was aroused by the fact that the betting was against his trotter. He gave $104,000 to a friend to sustain Boralma's reputation in the betting and won $92,000. And yet he claims that he has never been seriously interested in betting, and that his winnings on Boralma were simply an accident.

THAT $30,000 PINK

But it was the purchase of a pink carnation, wonderful in color and vigor, which had been named by a Boston experimental florist after Mrs. Lawson, that made Mr.

Lawson's name known all over the world. Thirty thousand dollars for a pink! The news was spread broadcast, and printed in the newspapers of all countries as an ill.u.s.tration of the vulgar extravagance and folly of an American millionaire.

Mr. Lawson explained that incident while I was with him, and his explanation threw a new light upon his character. He bought the flower originally as a matter of sentiment, but the sum he offered was comparatively small. Mr.

Higginbotham, of Chicago, bid $25,000 for the Lawson Pink.

When he heard this news, Mr. Lawson sat down with a florist friend and figured out the possibility of the new flower as a business investment. He closed the matter in a few minutes by paying $30,000. Some time later on the florist bought back the right to the Lawson pink for $30,000, and gave Mr.

Lawson, in addition, $15,000 profit, according to agreement.

A curious evidence of this man's astonis.h.i.+ng coolness is the fact that, at the very time when the market was closing on Friday, when it was whispered all over the country that he was arranging terms of peace for the Standard Oil with Mr.

Rogers, Mr. Lawson was actually explaining the peculiar and beautiful qualities of his favorite flower.

A REASON FOR HIS LAST ATTACK

"But if Amalgamated Copper shares were worth $100 when you were market manager for Mr. Rogers and his friends, how is it that they are not worth that price now?" I asked.

Mr. Lawson leaned against the edge of an open door and thrust his hands deeply into his pockets.

"I have tried to make that plain to the public," he said quietly.

"The other day Mr. Rogers's lawyer was trying to get me to stop. I told him that I intended to force the Standard Oil crowd to put the price of Amalgamated Copper back to $100, at which I advised my friends to buy it. He said that the stock was not worth $100. I asked him how he knew. He answered that Mr. Rogers, Mr. Stillman, Mr. Rockefeller, and the other fellows in control had discovered that they had been deceived when the property was bought. They did not consider it worth more than $45 a share.

"That settled it in my mind. I appealed to the public to test the situation. I advised them to sell Amalgamated at once and keep on selling. If it was worth $100, the men in the 'System,' having billions of dollars behind them, would buy it. If it was worth only $45 a share, then the price must fall to that point in the end. It was simply a question whether the public could unload on the Standard Oil crowd before the 'System' could unload on the public."

"Then you caught the leaders of Standard Oil at the psychological moment."

Mr. Lawson's smile was beyond words to describe.

"That partly explains the crash," he said. "They were ready to unload on the public, but the public moved too quickly.

Publicity destroyed the one great weapon of the Standard Oil men, which is secrecy. I had been tricked and deceived, and those who were responsible had used my name to deceive and trick the public. I got out into the open and laid the plot bare. I had been working up to that point for many years, always waiting, waiting, waiting for the day when I could begin a work of reformation in behalf of 80,000,000 of people.

"I know my game. I have stood here in Boston for thirty-six years studying man and his ways. I have no false conceptions of my own strength. I know, and I have known all along, that to win against a system backed by billions of dollars working in the dark and controlling largely the law-making powers of the nation, I must have the people with me. My articles in _Everybody's Magazine_ were simply in preparation of the public mind for the practical demonstration which I have made this week, that the whispering manipulators of Wall Street will not buy at $68 a share stock which they were selling to the public at $100 a share.

"The Standard Oil interests came into my world simply because they entered Boston to control gas affairs. They wanted to run their automobile down a particular road, but they found a fellow standing in the middle of the road. They did not dare to run over that fellow, as little as he was, because he warned them that he had in his pocket a stick of dynamite that would blow the machine up if it pa.s.sed over him. Mr. Rogers is a really big and brainy man. He saw and understood the situation. He offered to take me inside of his secret lines.

HIS INDEPENDENCE

"It is said by my enemies, and they are many--and some of them are crackajacks, I admit--that I am a squealer, that I have peached on my pals. That is absolutely untrue. From my boyhood up I have always insisted on being free and independent. I have punched a head when I thought it needed punching, without asking whose it was or what the consequences would be. But I have never consciously told a lie or violated a confidence. The newspaper files will show that when I made my deal with the Standard Oil people, I publicly announced that I had entered into a secret agreement with them. That brought a hurried call from Mr.

Rogers, who wanted to know what I meant. I told him, as I had told him before, that I had to work in my own way, that my methods were open and above board, and that I could not work successfully unless I was free to do things as I thought they should be done.

"That was my arrangement with Standard Oil. They had a great chest, and the whole method of the 'System' was to prevent any one from getting a peep at that chest save as one of them and on their own terms. I refused to be bound by their code. I told Mr. Rogers again and again that everything I learned as the market manager of the Standard Oil interests I felt free to use publicly at any time. Mr. Rogers again and again a.s.sured me that this was fully understood.

THE REMEDY

"All through that time I had, deep down in my heart, the plan which I am carrying out now. Each day brought me nearer to the day when I would expose the whole system of fraud to the public. Having that idea always present with me, I was careful to avoid deals or partners.h.i.+ps which involved any loss of independence to act when the day for action came. I have been worth as much as $28,000,000, and I have lost as much as $14,000,000. But never have I altered my purpose to awaken the public to a realization of the great crimes committed against them in the name of finance.

"If the people will stand by me, and I have always been open and honest with them, America will witness a great transformation. With an honest and courageous President in the White House we shall see whether the 'System' will be able to use the fiduciary inst.i.tutions of the country for piratical purposes. The fall in the price of Amalgamated and other pool stocks is only a bubble on the surface. The final revelation, and the final solution, are yet to come into sight."

Just then the telephone bell rang and Mr. Lawson put the receiver to his ear and laughed as he listened. "No," he answered softly, through the instrument, "I am not locked up with Mr. Rogers, but with a man who has more power."