here is that there exists no economy, no need to give something in return for
something you take, no law or rule that governs gift-giving. In this sense of
the word, the phrase “economy of the gift” is merely an excuse for escaping
from any and all economy.9
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Dreiser and upward mobility
One such economy is that of gender. Seeing loyalty as a free gift is conve-
nient for men, who can unconsciously expect that they will receive loyalties
and other services from their womenfolk for which no recompense or re-
muneration of any kind will be required. It encourages men to think of
themselves as children to whom everything is owed. The assumed or ideal
perspective here would seem to be that of the male (as) child. For the male
child, love is not only speculation, entailing no reciprocal obligations, but –
to the extent that he functions within a gender system or economy – it is an
inevitably successful speculation, an investment with a high and guaranteed return. This point helps explain the direction in which loyalty or emotional
capital will flow between Frank and his wife and mistress.10
But from the perspective of Frank’s public guilt or lack of it, the most
important economic reality that is evaded by speaking of an “economy of
the gift” is that which links finance via gifts – or bribes – to the power of
the state. No, you cannot steal that which is freely given. But who gives
Frank Cowperwood the funds he is accused of stealing? The only plausible
way to use the word gift in this context is if one identifies the giver as city treasurer Stener, a corrupt pawn of the Republican political machine then
ruling Philadelphia. Stener did not have the right to profit from, or to allow
Cowperwood to profit from, money that belonged to the people of the city of
Philadelphia. Like so many other financiers, Cowperwood makes his fortune
not on the open market but on the contrary by using political connections
to obtain illegal access to public funds and thus manipulating the market.
Butler’s upward mobility story, which makes possible Frank’s own, differs
from it only in minor details. Butler is “a poor young Irishman” who col-
lects garbage for free and feeds it to his pigs and cattle until “a local political character, a councilman friend of his,” has an idea. “Butler could be made
official garbage-collector. The council could vote an annual appropriation
for this service. Butler could employ more wagons than he did now – dozens
of them, scores. Not only that, but no other garbage-collector would be al-
lowed. There were others, but the official contract awarded to him would
also, officially, be the end of the life of any and every disturbing rival” (11).
Like Butler, Cowperwood derives his profits from the fact that the market
is not open but on the contrary closed down with help from official friends, made into a monopoly by the direct exercise of state power. Understandably
enough, Michaels underplays this state-oriented side of “finance capitalism,”
for it gives the supposedly victimless crime a source and a victim: the inhab-
itants of the city of Philadelphia.
But can the city of Philadelphia be properly described as a victim? In
response to the argument above, one might well object that the city does
not manifest collective consciousness of its interests or otherwise assert its
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b ru c e ro b b i n s
existence and rights, thus proving it is an entity capable of sustaining injury.
The ethical standards by which such an act might be judged are appropriate
to it only if it is a real entity. But a city is not real in the way a person
is real. Even now, who would suggest that one should be loyal or even
can be loyal to a city in the way one is expected to be loyal to a person?
And in historical perspective, the incongruity is even more stark. It might
be proposed, that is, that people had not yet come to see the abuse of the
municipality for private advantage as illegitimate. “There was a political
ring in Philadelphia in which the mayor, certain members of the council, the
treasurer, the chief of police, the commissioner of public works, and others
shared. It was a case generally of ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours.’
Cowperwood thought it rather shabby work at first, but many men were
rapidly getting rich and no one seemed to care. The newspapers were always
talking about civic patriotism and pride but never a word about these things”
(10). “No one seemed to care”: in the period Dreiser was describing, in other
words, there existed little if any organized public opinion that defined such
behavior as a crime, few if any representatives of the city of Philadelphia
who were ready to contest the legitimacy of what Butler, Cowperwood,
Mollenhauer, and their cronies were doing. The newspapers are silent. The
Municipal Reform Association is described as ineffectual. For all intents and
purposes, the relevant ethics was not yet in place. And not all that much has
changed. Outcry against the immense corporate scandals of our own time,
such as Enron and WorldCom, again involving direct collaboration between
financiers and their friends in the government, again involving a failure to
rescue the victims from statistical anonymity and put faces on them, has
again been pitifully weak, thus suggesting that such an ethics is still very
flimsily implanted in the public sphere, that the public is still very much
at risk of under-representation and under-protection. All the more reason,
then, to understand Dreiser’s lack of outrage against Cowperwood, and the
uninhibited excitement Dreiser seems to permit himself at the possibility of
making fortunes in an ethical area still thought of as gray.
All of this is true enough, and yet the history is in fact a bit more com-
plicated. In the period in which Dreiser was writing, elements of this new
ethical sensibility were already starting to emerge, even if they had not yet
quite cohered. Large institutional entities suddenly demanded to be treated
as real persons. They demanded loyalty, and in doing so they also redefined
loyalty. The claims made for these newly emergent entities – I’m speaking
most obviously of corporations – were necessarily accompanied by stren-
uous ethical re-arrangements. The very concept of a corporation required
a re-definition of what was and was not criminal or blameworthy. Limited
liability had of course been resisted initially on the grounds that it subverted 118
Dreiser and upward mobility
proper personal responsibility for one’s debts, that is, for one’s actions. With the rise of the corporation, the conventional system of exchange between an
action (for example, a piece of work accomplished or a theft) and its reward
or punishment was disturbed, and the meaning of loyalty along with it. It is
this disturbance that Michaels’ argument both reflects and misinterprets. For
the subverting of a previously transparent relation between an action and
its reward or punishment does not happen solely at the behest of corporate
capitalism. Rising along with the corporation are similarly large, abstract,
impersonal entities like the city government of Philadelphia.11 And, some-
what more slowly, at the federal, state, and municipal levels, what will come
to be called the “welfare state.”
Often these official entities seem to come after and in response to capital-
ism. But as we saw above, they may also serve as hidden source of the funds
that will then be displayed as the supposed fruit of a capitalist’s hard work
and financial wizardry. In terms of timing, the period of what Michaels calls
“finance capitalism” more or less coincides with the period of the expan-
sion of government and the rise of the welfare state. And in order to rise,
the welfare state too needed to shift decisively the meaning of individual
responsibility. To put this as pithily as possible: once upon a time, if you
were homeless, it was because you refused to work. Poverty was equated
with moral failure. There could be no move in the direction of what we now
call welfare – state responsibility to care for those most in need – until the
equation of poverty with immorality had been broken, until responsibility
for poverty had come to be seen as (at least in part) systemic and shared
rather than exclusively individual, until the general ethical sensibility had
swerved in the direction of “no fault.”
The modifications thus entailed in the notion of the accountable self are
a central theme of Howard Horwitz’s By the Law of Nature: Form and
Value in Nineteenth-Century America, which finds illustrations in Dreiser’s financier. Though Cowperwood is “frequently called self-reliant and self-sufficient,” Horwitz shows, his upward mobility story is not in fact an ex-
ample of “Emersonian self-reliance.”12 On the contrary, it is achieved by
“an effacement of agency” (197). Cowperwood exercises power “by taking
himself off the market” (198). Though the example Horwitz is mainly inter-