CHAPTER XXXVI
THE EMPIRE OF BUSINESS
Let the reader not misunderstand my thesis. I do not claim
that there exists in America one thoroughly organized and
completely conscious business government. What we have is
a number of groups, struggling for power; and sometimes
these groups fall out with one another, and make war upon
one another, and then we see a modern application of the
ancient adage, "When thieves fall out, honest men come into
their own." If, for example, you had studied the press of
New York City at the time of the life insurance exposures, you
would certainly have concluded that this press was serving
the public interest. As it happens, I followed that drama of
life insurance with the one man in America who had most to
do with it, the late James. B. Dill. Judge Dill ran a publicity
bureau in New York for several months, and handed out the
greater part of this scandal to the newspaper reporters. He
told me precisely how he was doing it, and precisely why he was
doing it, and I knew that this whole affair, which shook the
nation to its depths, was simply the Morgan and Ryan interests
taking away the control of life insurance money from irresponsible
people like "Jimmy" Hyde, and bringing it under the
control of people who were responsible—that us, responsible
to Morgan and Ryan. The whole campaign was conducted for
that purpose; the newspapers of New York all understood that
it was conducted for that purpose, and when that purpose was
accomplished, the legislative investigations and the newspaper
clamor stopped almost over-night.
And all through this terrific uproar I noticed one curious thing—there was never in any single newspaper or magazine or speech dealing with the question the faintest hint of the one intelligent solution of the problem—that is, government insurance. I made several efforts to get something on the subject into the New York papers; I gave interviews—I have forgotten now to what papers, but I know that these interviews never got by the blue pencil. It took the emergency of war-*time to force government insurance—and now the lobby of
