leaders of Philadelphia, is simply normal business practice for the Pinkertons.
There is a strong hint of amorality in this everyday professionalism.
Though Butler happens to be an outraged father who wants evidence that
the standards of traditional morality are being violated, he could just as
easily have come as a criminal – as indeed he is, one might say, though
no law he might be breaking is ever made explicit. Professionalism in its
most amoral, mercenary sense is what Dreiser might have associated with
the role the Pinkertons had played, seven years after Pinkerton’s death and
two years before Dreiser’s arrival in Pittsburgh, as violent strikebreakers at
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Homestead.16 Even Pinkerton’s biographer describes this as “the blackest
episode in the history of American labor” (120). As a former friend said, “it
became his unlucky destiny to give his name to an army of illegal soldiers
not under the command of the nation or the state, an impudent menace to
liberty: an irresponsible brigade of hired banditi” (213). The factory owners
could afford to hire a private army, and money guaranteed its loyalty. Civic
loyalties seemed weak by contrast, much as in The Financier; the public authorities were irrelevant. The Pinkertons could thus be seen as professionally
neutral in the sense that they were awaiting a paymaster. But the paymaster,
upon arrival, would inevitably turn out to be an appendage of naked, brutal
power.
But there are other, very different things Dreiser would also have known
about the Pinkertons. In 1867, which is to say early on in Frank Cowper-
wood’s career as a manipulator of financial markets, Allan Pinkerton solved
a high-profile case that involved, of all things, fraud on the financial markets.
Pinkerton was hired by Western Union “to investigate a group of criminals
who were tapping the company’s wires somewhere on the western frontier,
and either using the information thus gained for insider trading, or transmit-
ting false messages to the eastern newspapers which had an adverse effect
on the New York stock market. Many companies, notably the Pacific Steam
Navigation Company, were driven to the edge of bankruptcy, and fraud on a
massive scale was estimated to run to many millions of dollars.”17 Pinkerton
solved the case by locating “a broker who had made a fortune by buying up
the vastly depreciated stocks of companies named in the more sensational
disaster stories” (183–184). If one remembers who Butler and his friends are
and how their fortunes were made and continue to be augmented, one starts
to balance the reassurance the Pinkerton agent offers Butler against a certain
ethical threat. It’s as if only the Pinkertons were acting effectively against just the sort of financial fraud that the novel takes as its central subject. And as if, though acting at the behest of a huge monopoly, Pinkerton were also acting
on behalf of the public. His public spiritedness was in fact surprisingly and
disquietingly genuine. After the trial of the ringleaders, Pinkerton “drafted
a twelve-page document outlining the case for Federal legislation to protect
and control the telegraph lines.” This document “was never implemented”
(184), but the responsibility for its non-implementation lay with the public’s
elected representatives, not with Pinkerton.
In short, there is an area of considerable overlap between the seeming
professional amorality of the Pinkertons – their willingness to work for any-
one, no questions asked, to take their small but secure cut from the riskier
competitive activities around them – and the still embryonic public ethics of
the state, which the Pinkerton agents exemplify by their principled refusal
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b ru c e ro b b i n s
to use their knowledge for personal profit.18 One could thus describe their
professionalism both as existing within finance capitalism and as operating
against finance capitalism. What we see here is neither amorality nor conven-
tional morality. We see, as it emerges, an un conventional morality – not the absence or negation of morality but rather a proto-principle, not yet agreed
upon, not yet conventional.
Professional loyalty is of course monopolistic. In this it resembles love.
And one might speculate that the professionalism of the Pinkertons shares in
the amoral excitement, or in what is exciting about the escape from morality,
of Cowperwood’s attraction to Aileen. But there is a moral element to this
loyalty. By way of conclusion, let me try to emphasize this point by a sort of
shortcut. It might be argued that Frank’s relation with Aileen is in some sense really a relationship with her father, who has given him the necessary leg up
in the world of municipal politics and has thus done more than anyone else
to make Frank’s fortune.19 And behind this loyalty to both Butlers, father
and daughter, is an equally libidinized relation to the city of Philadelphia
itself. For it is the city’s expanding network of streetcars with which his
investor’s heart first falls in love. And it is the city’s (corrupt) government that temporarily allows him to realize his amorous dream of merging with
the young and growing metropolis, fostering it, possessing it, controlling it.
Frank’s love for the city of Philadelphia – the city of brotherly love – is not quite fraternal or morally chaste. But it can make the reader feel, even in the midst of so unpromising a story, the subtle emergence of a loyalty and an
ethical sensibility that cannot be reduced to utterly unscrupulous Enron-style
profiteering.
N O T E S
1 E. L. Doctorow, “Introduction,” Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (New York: Bantam, 1982), p. vi. More might be said here about Doctorow himself as a progressive, muckraking writer who like Dreiser could not escape from the magnetic spell of the upward mobility story.
2 Theodore Dreiser, The Financier, afterword by Larzer Ziff (New York: New American Library, 1967). Chapter numbers are given in parentheses.
3 Alex Pitofsky, “Dreiser’s The Financier and the Horatio Alger Myth,” Twentieth-Century Literature 44:3 (Fall 1998): 276–290.
4 Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism: American Literature at the Turn of the Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 61.
5 In Dreiser and Veblen: Saboteurs of the Status Quo, Clare Eby shows that Dreiser is at best weakly and intermittently committed to the valuing of utilitarian
“industry” over a no-holds-barred “business.” Eby takes Veblen’s “yardsticks”
of “serviceability, productivity, and usefulness to the entire community” (76) and his preference for the engineer over the financier (77) and demonstrates that they 124
Dreiser and upward mobility
have little if any hold over Dreiser, whose value as a cultural critic, she concludes, comes solely from his refusal of self-denial and other aspects of conventional
morality.
6 Gifts seem different in this sense from speculations, which are based on debt that must be repaid, as Cowperwood discovers when he is indicted.
7 Emerson, “On Gifts,” Essays, Second Series.
8 See John Frow, “Gift and Commodity,” in Time and Commodity Culture:
Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 102–217 and Bruno Karsenti, Marcel Mauss: Le fait social total (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994).
9 One might describe this as a (misplaced) deconstructionism, locally and
opportunistically applied in the service of an ultimately anti-deconstructive
determinism.
10 Frank is described as possessing a natural “magnetism,” an ability to inspire confidence in others. This ability is clearly of much usefulness both in his erotic life and in his business life. (In this sense it reinforces the intuition that the two go together.) In both, it can be translated as an ability to receive more loyalty from others than one is obliged to give them – that is, to benefit from a loyalty surplus that can be exchanged for its equivalent in money. Or an ability to inspire loyalty in others above and beyond the limits of their own self-interest.
11 Note that the corporation is not yet the characteristic business organization in The Financier.
12 Howard Horwitz, By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
13 The New York Times, 23 November 1986, sect. 3:5, quoted in Horwitz, By the Law of Nature, p. 190.
14 Of course, there is no level playing field even in prison: Cowperwood’s advantages on the outside translate directly into privileges in prison.
15 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979).
16 It’s worth noting that, along with Yerkes, Andrew Carnegie was part of the com-posite that went into Cowperwood’s character: see James M. Hutchisson, “The
Revision of Theodore Dreiser’s Financier,” Journal of Modern Literature 20:2
(Winter, 1996), 199–213.
17 James Mackay, Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), p. 183.
18 On the characteristically American overlap between public and private agencies in the development of the welfare state, see Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Cross-ings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998).