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When Theodore Roosevelt started "trust-busting," the ordinary citizen could readily visualize a series of industrial evils that finally hit his own pocketbook. Small companies combined into big ones; big ones combined into monopolies; monopolies fixed higher prices; the ordinary citizen paid more for his food. clothes, transportation. On such a clear-cut issue T. R. easily rallied the nation.
But the private banking issue was less demonstrable. Insinuating though he was, Inquisitor Pecora had yet to prove that it had anything to do with the Cost of Living.
Under contemplation, broadly speaking, were the social uses of wealth. In a Democracy was it right for one man. one firm to have the incalculable economic influence implied in the 167 directorates held by Morgan partners? Was it in the public interest that railroads, public utilities, food companies, manufacturing concerns supplying millions of people with
daily necessities, should take orders, in whole or in part, from No. 23 Wall St.? These were questions of policy, not of fact, which the country rather than the Senate committee would have to answer. Though they obviously cannot have it both ways, radicals and half-baked liberals talk in one breath about bankers' "plots" to run the country ruthlessly, and in the next breath they denounce capitalism because it lacks a plan —a "plot" — for running the country at all. But a bankers' "plot" to run the country—or the lack of it— is a very difficult thing to prove, even for a Senate committee aided by a Pecora. Unlike the industrial monopolies of 1907, financial power in 1933 is not a thing to be established by yes & no testimony. The social implications of such prestige as is bound up in a House of Morgan cannot readily be reduced to a dollars & cents basis for the ordinary citizen to see and understand its effect on him. So far in the Morgan investigation the individual could find whatever he was looking for to prove this or that economic preconception but the country at large was still too close to the facts to weigh the larger questions of the policy. The tax escape issue petered out when a flaw in the law was popularly understood. The bankers' "friends" being let in on the ground floor of public stock flotations ("Just want you to know we were thinking of you") became the first clear ground for a public stand, and even here the ground was limited. Familiar enough with stockmarket tips, the average citizen could not, except in envy, condemn private individuals who enjoyed the friendship of the House of Morgan. But he could view with alarm the presence in public office of Morgan favorites. When Pennsylvania's Governor Pinchot found State Supreme Court Justices William I. Schaffer and John W. Kephart on the Morgan list, he first demanded their resignations to save the bother of impeachments. In Massachusetts onetime Governor Fuller announced he would run against Lieutenant Governor Bacon for the Governorship because Mr. Bacon was a Morgan insider.