Today we close our short series consisting of the full text
of Judge Peter S. Grosscup’s “long lost” talk on anti-trust legislation from
October of 1907 — right after financier J. Pierpont Morgan caused the “Panic of
1907” by taking advantage of the financial mismanagement and shenanigans by the
management of an important bank. As
Grosscup concluded,
Workers Should, If
Possible, Be Part Owners
One thing more in the line of structural principles. The
first duty of every enterprise, incorporated or private, is to secure to the
capital invested its eventual safe return, while paying on it from time to
time, after payment of operating expenses, such fair returns for its use as the
nature of the venture suggests. That is what capital always has the right to
ask. But this having been accomplished, there are some enterprises now that
take labor and management into partnership in the further disposition of the
fruits of success. That kind of partnership is not compulsory, and is not
usual. I would not make it compulsory, but I would try to infuse into the
corporation of the future an incentive and a spirit that would make it more
usual — that would give to the workman, the clerk, the employee of every kind
an opportunity to individually share in the growth of the enterprise to which
he is attached. This is not a mere philanthropic dream. The spirit will come
when the employee feels that what he gets he gets as a matter of contract, not
as a matter of gift, and is as secure therein as is the corresponding interest
of the employer; and when the employer wakes up ‘to the truth that as it is not
by bread alone that men live, it is not for bread alone that men put forth
their best work. And the incentive may be supplied by the application of those
well-known powers of taxation that instead of being wholly directed toward
transferring to the government a part of the success of the successful, could
be employed to bring about a wider diffusion of the permanent fruits of success
among those who by their labor had contributed to the success. This is not
socialism. It may have the philanthropic spirit of socialism, but in its end
and aim it is the antidote of socialism — in any long look ahead the only
antidote on which individualism can securely rely.
Do not misunderstand me — there is no way known, before men
or under Heaven, to legislate men into the possession of anything. All we can
do is to open the door — to hold out the opportunity. But that done — honestly,
effectively done — I rely on the instincts of the American to do the rest.
I stood once on a battleship, marveling at what the
lightnings did. They lifted and lowered the anchor; they fan messages from the
pilot house to the engine room; they lifted the ammunition from the magazine to
the guns; they loaded the guns, leveled them to the mark aimed at, fired them;
they lighted the ship when in friendly waters and darkened her when in the
waters of the enemy; without a moment’s intermission they swept the seas for a
thousand miles around in search of whatever tidings the circle of a thousand
miles might have; and through it all they remained as free as the lightnings
that play in the summer clouds. The genius of man has not harnessed the
lightnings; they work out his task only because the genius of man has given
them the material agency, the open door through which to work out their own
inherent instincts.
The Corporation
Should Be an Institution of the People
What government is to mankind politically organized I have
already said the corporation, as an intermediary is to industry organized. It
is the pride of free institutions that they have diffused among the people the
political power of the mass. But that is not the secret of successful free
government. The secret of the success of free government is, that by opening to
the people the door to power they have awakened a universal instinct among men,
and have created the capacity to successfully exercise that instinct; so much
so that it can be safely said that the successful government of the people, by
the people, for the people, is not the product so much of the institution
itself as of the opportunity that the institution opens up. And what can be
done with the political instincts of mankind can be done with any instinct
deeply imbedded in human nature.
It is for the reconstructed corporation, then, as an
effective, trustworthy medium through which to work out one of the deepest and
most insistent of human instincts, that I plead. I hold it up, it is true, as
the ultimate fundamental solution of the merely economic problem of
competition. But it is not an economic cause solely that I plead. It is a human
cause. In the day when the conscience of this country went under the leadership
of Lincoln the supreme human inquiry was, shall there be put into course of
ultimate extinction the system whereby men were not permitted to eat the bread
earned in the sweat of their own brows. It was a mighty moral and political
inquiry. In our day that inquiry is settled. There is now no cloud upon the
brow, no shackle upon the arm of any American anywhere. Before the law they all
stand equal. But the same great movement in the affairs of men that has carried
that great question into the western horizon has brought up over the eastern
horizon this other great truth, written almost as long ago and by the same
great hand, that it is not by bread alone that men live. And the question I put
to you now in closing is, will you not, in declaring in favor of amendments of
the Sherman Act that will put that act in accord with the economic necessity of
the times, declare also in favor of such thoroughgoing reconstruction of the
corporation that it — the medium through which almost alone is wielded the
world’s industrial energies — will be put in accord with one of the deepest
human instincts of all times.
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