The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

good barons 493$3 billion he collected from Microsoft’s first-time paying of dividends. Thisis the virtue of the liberal man, in Aquinas’s words: “By reason of his notbeing a lover of money, it follows that a man readily makes use of it, whetherfor himself, or for the good of others, or for God’s glory.” 11You’ll want to reply, if you remain in thrall to the anticapitalist opinions ofthe Progressives, “Yeah, but they stole it in the first place.” No, dear, they didnot. Please try to listen more carefully. “The genius and labors of the socalledrobber barons,” writes Michael Novak, “transformed social possibilities. . . and set the lives of millions on an upward path”—including Novak’sSlovak American ancestors working in Carnegie’s and Morgan’s steel mills. 12Admittedly, they corrupted politics. But when have the rich not donethat? Yon Cassius hath a lean and hungry look. As the barons said in extenuation,weren’t the politicians themselves at fault? We’re just playing thegame. Mark Twain remarked in 1897, in “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar,”that it could “probably be shown by facts and figures that there is nodistinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” 13 As Collis Huntingtonwrote in 1877, “If you have to pay money [to a politician] to have theright thing done, it is only just and fair to do it. ...Ifa [politician] has thepower to do great evil and won’t do right unless he is bribed to do it, I think. . . it is a man’s duty to go up and bribe.” 14 Honest graft.Seriously, now, these men were not saints of love or justice in their work.But they were not pirates, either. Their Pinkertons broke up labor unions,true. And people like Marshall Field and George Pullman in Chicago conspiredto sic the police on law-abiding anarchists. Yet many other businessleaders in Chicago in the Gilded Age, such as Montgomery Ward, looked forwardeven in the 1880s to a capitalism-enriched world in which workers likeyou and me would have to be enticed to come to work, paid $60,000 to workin Cincinnati’s sewers, for example. Even Pullman looked forward to such afuture, at least when he was allowed to boss people around in his lovely littletown for the workers south of Chicago and resist the unionization of hisPullman porters.Carnegie, who before the Homestead Strike had spent a good deal ofwind preaching cooperation between labor and capital, was in fact appalledby the outcome—though he had left the dirty business to Frick, and hid outon his estate in Scotland. He told Frick to break the unions, corresponding