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Bernard M. Baruch: Disraeli
There is no fun in being not a wonder but a copy book. And a perfectly logical mind would flirt with Disraeli warily. It would say, "One does not at fifty change from business to politics with success. Disraeli didn't start out in Wall Street. As the Germans say, `what will become vinegar sours early.'" Mr. Baruch slips easily through the three sides of this reasoning. Life is not logical. Fate is not logical. He is not logical.
He has had his taste of public life under Wilson and he wants more. I venture to say that he would give every one of his many millions and be as poor, well, poorer than any member of the present cabinet, to be in the place Mr. Hughes occupies to-day.
Everyone who knows him has heard him say that when he entered office he resolved to quit business because he learned so much as head of the War Industries Board that it would be improper for him ever to go into the market again. There is more to it than that; public life has given him a profound distaste for mere money-making. He wrote to Senator Kenyon the other day that he had not made a dollar since he went to work for the government. I believe that to be true for I have found him an extraordinarily truthful and honest man. He has that desire for public distinction which is so often characteristic of his race. He has the idealism, a characteristic also of the race which gave to the world two great religions. He has the same passion for public service now that he once had for the market. And he belongs to a race, which, in spite of all our national catholicity on the subject of races, has never yet produced its Disraeli in America, and to a party out of power, perhaps for a long time, and he spent his youth learning a trade which is not the trade he would follow now.
All of this accounts for his restlessness. He is still youthful and has enormous energies and no occupation for them. He loves personal publicity and has an instinct for it, not so keen as Hoover's or Will H. Hays', but still keen.
Whither shall he turn? To the organization of his party? There he may buy the right to be lampooned and in the end, if his party succeeds, to be introduced into the Cabinet apologetically, as Hays and Daugherty were, on the plea that the President must appoint a number of party workers. To the Senate? It is a body which affords escape from the boredom of small town life for men who have grown rich on the frontier or in the dull Middle West. It carries with it an excuse to live in Washington, some social position there, and a title envied in Marion, Reno, Butte, or Salt Lake City. Senators who start young serve long and obediently, suppressing all their natural instincts for self-expression, and attain if they are lucky the scant distinction of a committee chairmanship in a legislature that has steadily tended toward submergence. To the House? Individuals are lost in the House. And the Presidency comes to few, and by chance.
Knowing his ambition for public distinction and his wealth, men go to him every day to sell him the road to power and influence, and, if you will, public service. Let him have the Democratic organization on condition of paying its debts and financing its activities. One faction of the Democratic party recently sought control, spreading the understanding that Mr. Baruch would, in the event of its success, open wide his pocket book. After the meeting of the National Committee at which this faction met its defeat I said to a prominent member of the victorious group: "Now that you have won you will probably get Baruch's money. He is restless, eager to find an outlet for his energies, less interested in any personality than in his party. Hang on and wait and he must come to you." "Do you know," he replied, lowering his voice confidentially, "That is just the way I diagnose it."
And at this very time the Republicans, hearing much of Mr. Baruch's money and its use to build up such an intensive organization for the Democrats, as Chairman Hays with a million or two at his disposal had erected for them, considered seriously whether or not it would not be wise themselves to occupy Mr. Baruch's energies and divert his ambitions away from party organization. They debated putting Mr. Baruch on the commission to reorganize the executive departments of the government. All had their eyes on the same ambition and the same wealth!
Several daily newspapers in New York, and I know not how many magazines and weeklies, have been offered at one time or another to Mr. Baruch, for it is known that one of his ideas of public service is to own and edit a great liberal journal, a "Manchester Guardian" of America. But an opportunity to buy a newspaper in New York is an opportunity to invest $3,000,000 or $4,000,000, to lose $500,000 or more for several years thereafter and to become the national figure that Mr. Ochs is, or Mr. Reid is, or Mr. Munsey is, certainly something far short of the American Disraeli or even the Baruch of the War Industries Board.
Mr. Baruch, you will observe, has no vulgar illusions about what money will buy. He likes money. It brings with it a certain personal enlargement. It adds to the romance of himself in his own eyes, as well as in the eyes of others. It procures the flattering ears of journalists, and a place on front pages, and, if one inclines toward ostentation, even the ownership of a newspaper itself.
But money will not buy a commanding place in public life. And even if it would buy such a place he would not be content to do other than earn one. He wants to repeat the thrills of his youth in the market, in the thrills of a second youth in Washington. He is incurably romantic.
To sum him all up in a sentence--he has an extraordinary sense of wonder and an unequalled sense of reality, the sense of wonder directed toward himself, the sense of reality directed largely but not exclusively elsewhere.