ested in is the trust, he shows that this new, effaced, off-market agency is also mirrored in those government agencies that arose and expanded in order to
restrict the new monopolistic corporations and to deal with the new scale
of human disasters they left in their wake. “To catch insiders like Boesky,
Boesky’s lawyer remarked, the Securities and Exchange Commission must
be ‘everywhere at the same time,’ must, that is, be more trust-like than the
monopolist.”13 It is precisely the trust-like power of the city, in Horwitz’s
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argument, that attracts Cowperwood’s imagination and money as an alter-
native to other, more strictly corporate forms of speculation. In his first rise, he makes his fortune by means of a “privileged relationship with the city
treasurer” which involves, like the city treasurer’s own activities, “control
without ‘actual ownership’” (199). However unethically, Cowperwood acts
here both as and like an agent of the government. And the secret of his sec-
ond rise, after he gets out of prison, is his investment in “streetcar and gas
lines,” which “are less individualistically based than stockjobbing.”
Whatever the problems tracing ownership in the period, and however much
ownership and control were diverging, ordinary speculation and investment
always retain the risk of liability, since they point to assets (or the lack thereof) and persons. Albeit ‘fictitious persons,’ corporations still point to persons,
fictitious or otherwise. This fact, after all, is what returned Cowperwood to
fortune after his prison term. During the panic of 1878, Jay Cooke’s investment house closes. The problem with Cooke’s house, in Cowperwood’s view, is that
it is ‘dependent upon . . . one man.’ It is such dependence and traceability – that is, conventional individuality – that Frank seeks to eschew in his obsession with surpassing speculation. In urban utilities he sees an opportunity to disappear
entirely, to become an element in the city’s inexorable expansion and thus
endlessly satisfy his insatiable, because unlocalized, self.
(202)
To say that “gas and street railways are public services tied to cities” (202) is to say that they are tied to “an entity less volatile than the market” (202).
But if so, then the self involved is not really “unlocalized” or “insatiable.”
However characteristic it may be of the market, the word “insatiable” is less
perfectly matched to the new sort of self that arises together with the “less
volatile” institutions of public service and municipal governance.
Here it may be helpful to remember Cowperwood’s somewhat prolonged
interaction with another branch of government. He spends a substantial
number of the novel’s pages in prison. And while in prison, he conducts
himself in a modest and orderly fashion. His conduct is satisfactory to his
guards, and the experience is not all that far from satisfactory to himself. A
truly insatiable protagonist might well have been crushed by his imprison-
ment or rebelled angrily against it. Aside from one tearful collapse in Aileen’s arms – a moment that reveals Aileen as a non-speculative parental harbor, as
much a mother as a lover, and in this sense indistinguishable from Lillian –
Frank adapts to prison without blaming either himself or those who put him
there. With a certain civility, he seems to accept being a prisoner as more or
less continuous with his earlier life.14
This surprising pliability in prison is a reminder of certain quietly remark-
able moments elsewhere in the novel. Despite fierce conflicts of interest and
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desire, Frank refuses to talk to either Butler or Lillian as if they were his enemies. Despite Stener’s betrayal, we are told that Frank alone would have set
him up in business again, on Stener’s release from prison, when the latter’s
allies fail him: “The man who would have actually helped him if he had only
known was Frank A. Cowperwood. Stener could have confessed his mis-
take, as Cowperwood saw it, and Cowperwood would have given him the
money gladly, without any thought of return” (57). Slow to feel outraged by
the aggressions of others, Cowperwood seems less representative of a rob-
ber baron than of a parole officer or a court-appointed therapist. The “one
thing that Cowperwood objected to at all times” was the fact that Lillian
is “moral,” which is to say “reproachful” (56). Cowperwood is himself not
reproachful. He is described as “shameless” (56), but it is just as noteworthy
that he is unwilling to shame others.
If this refusal to subject others to shame or reproach seems amoral, its
amorality is not that of naturalism’s insatiable, power-hungry competitor;
one would be more inclined to think of the “therapeutic” sensibility that
Christopher Lasch sees as marking the decline of self-reliance and the work
ethic. And as Lasch laments, this is an ethic closely associated with increased dependence on ever-expanding government institutions. Lasch writes: “The
atrophy of older traditions of self-help has eroded everyday competence,
in one area after another, and has made the individual dependent on the
state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies” (37). What Lasch calls
the therapeutic sensibility finds its apotheosis in the institutions of the welfare state, key examples of “the new paternalism”: “Capitalism has severed the
ties of personal dependence only in order to revive dependence under cover
of bureaucratic rationality.” The ideology of “welfare liberalism,” Lasch
concludes, “absolves individuals of moral responsibility and treats them as
victims of social circumstance” (369). The result is “new modes of social
control” dealing with “the deviant as a patient” and substituting “medical
rehabilitation for punishment” (369–370).15 Reluctant to blame or punish,
Cowperwood cannot be called civic-minded, but he is strangely sociable.
And thus representative, one might say, of a new sort of sociability that has
become increasingly characteristic – for better as well as for worse – both of
public policy and of private life: what one might call a no-fault sensibility.
Cowperwood’s prison display of humble adaptability, rather than the un-
daunted fire that might have been expected of a ruthless and titanic financier, is entirely consistent with one of the novel’s most explicit natural images for him. In the novel’s afterword, “Concerning Mycteroperca Bonaci,” we are
told that the Black Grouper lives long and grows very large “because of its
very remarkable ability to adapt to conditions . . . Lying at the bottom of
a bay, it can simulate the mud by which it is surrounded.” In his business
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success, Frank too is a bottom feeder. Proud gestures and noble risks are
taken by others around him, but he “did not want to be a stock gambler”
(7). To pursue the gambling analogy, we might say that he is not a gambler
but the house: whatever happens, he always gets his cut. And if so, then he
would also have to be assigned a different role in the better-known allegory
of the lobster and the squid. This allegory answers the question “‘How is
life organized?’ Things lived on each other – that was it. Lobsters lived on
squids and other things” (1). Frank is not the lobster, after all; he is the hand that put the two together in the tank. In nature, the squid had a chance
of escaping. It has no chance here precisely because this competition is not
natural but man-made. It’s not that life is organized, but that it has been organized in a particular way. People, who live on lobsters, have placed lobster and squid in the tank together, and it is presumably those people who
benefit in some sense from the competition in which they do not themselves
participate. The same might be said of Cowperwood, who uses city funds to
profit safely from the rising and falling investments of others who must risk
their own money. And who in doing so acts both illegally and in imitation
of the state itself. After all, what is the state but a transparent tank which
shapes the struggle for existence for all those within it?
Here we can return to Butler’s relations with the Pinkertons. What is
intriguing about the Pinkerton interview is that, unlike bonds within families
or between lovers, it seems to represent a new, socially emergent principle
of loyalty. Once the initial arrangements have been made, Butler says, “‘I’m
much obliged to you. I’ll take it as a great favor, and pay you well.’” The reply is “‘Never mind about that . . . You’re welcome to anything this concern can
do for you at the ordinary rates’” (35). The Pinkerton representative takes
Butler out of the realm of the personal, where the firm’s action would be
a “favor” and, as the other side of the same coin, would also suggest the
danger of someone taking personal advantage. This is not a favor; it’s what’s
done at the “ordinary rates.” In other words, the loyalty the detective agency
offers to Butler is clearly not a gift. “Confidence,” a refusal to take advantage of insider information that contrasts starkly with how things are done by the