Abstract
David Graham Phillips (1867-1911) was murdered with six rounds from a small-caliber pistol at 1:30 p.m. on the steps of the Princeton Club (formerly Stanford White’s home) near Gramercy Park in Manhattan on January 23, 1911 because he had written truthfully about plutocrats. One of them, a professional violinist from old Maryland money, went mad after reading Phillips’ novel, The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig (1909), and shot him, thinking he would thereby redeem his sister’s reputation which he imagined the author had besmirched in the book—a woman the novelist had never met nor knew. The murderer’s paranoidal diary explained that Phillips was practicing “literary vampirism,” transferring lifeblood from real people into his fictional characters. Phillips had become famous as a journalist. His series on the perfidy and venality of the Senate in Cosmopolitan (and in 1911 as a book, The Treason of the Senate), gave rise to the Seventeenth Amendment. This set of articles prompted Theodore Roosevelt to invent the word “muckrakers,” applied not only to Phillips, of course, but to many writers of the time who were uncovering graft, greed, and malfeasance throughout American government and industry. This predictable aftermath of the Gay Nineties and the amoral triumph of the Robber Barons, until recently the unrivalled period in American history for untrammeled capitalist exploitation, was ripe for analysis and satire, which Phillips and his colleagues adroitly provided. His 27 books each sold in the hundreds of thousands, and he became the dapper Tom Wolfe of his age (including wearing white suits), catering to a growing middle class which wanted to know “how things really worked” in New York City, Washington, DC, and other centers of socio-economic power, like Chicago and St. Louis.
The Plum Tree was his eighth novel in five years—he wrote 6,000 words per day—and the first of his many to dispense with formulaic romance so that he might delve instead into the technical means whereby plutocrats and their governmental minions ran the United States to suit themselves, trouncing anyone who resisted them. It is clear from its construction and dialogue that its author had eavesdropped on conversations among powerful men, and/or had found informants who gave him the “inside dope.” Its apparent authenticity caused The Plum Tree to become Phillips’ first big success as a novelist, and for good reason.
When set beside the avalanche of books appearing since 2008 that explain from one vantage point or another how and why the Great Recession began, Phillips’ novel is not only more readable and humanly anchored, but also shockingly coincident with the latest scholarly and journalistic investigations. Headlines of the newspapers for which Phillips wrote could without much editing be inserted into today’s pages covering the business and government deal-making which precipitated the most recent crash. As Marx and many others have noted, capitalist accumulation requires certain invariant conditions, and graft between regulators and the allegedly regulated, between the rulers and the ruled, is surely one of them. (The Chinese seem to have rediscovered this vital characteristic of “the free market” after their experiment with a planned economy was ended.)
The “plum tree,” when properly shook, drops patronage and graft into expectant hands of the men (sic) who vote as they are told in state and federal legislatures and committees, assuring that “the interests,” however identified, maintain control over taxes, fees, salaries, and whatever else they deign to steal from an impotent public. Many passages convey the subtleties of how this works: “[The party boss] finances his own machine from what he collects from vice and crime in those cities. He gives that branch of the plum tree to the boys. He keeps the bigger one, the corporations, for himself” (p. 103). A national party official speaks: “I would ‘take care’ of them, would admit them to the coveted inclosure round the plum tree. The plum tree! Is there any kind of fruit which gladdens the eyes of ambitious man, that does not glisten upon some one of its many boughs, heavy-laden with corporate and public honors and wealth?” (p. 145).
The novel is a textbook on political-economic manipulation, gamesmanship, and crafty politics: “I have no doubt that to the average citizen, leading a small, quiet life. . . the stupendous facts of accumulations of wealth and wholesale, far-and-wide purchases of the politicians, the vast system of bribery. . . seem impossibilities. . .Nor can he understand the way superior men play the great games, the heartlessness of ambition, the cynicism of political and commercial prostitution, the sense of superiority to the legal and moral codes which comes to most men with success. Your average citizen is a hero-worshiper, too” (p. 336).
And there are dozens of passages which anticipate today’s news in eerie but, on reflection, unsurprising tones: “. . . the railways [the “interests”] traversing our state sent to the capitol a bill that had been drawn by our ablest lawyers and revised by the craftiest of the great corporation lawyers in New York City. Its purpose, most shrewdly and slyly concealed, was to except the railways from practically all taxation. It was so subtly worded that this would be disclosed only when the companies should be brought to court for refusing to pay their usual share of the taxes. Such measures are usually ‘straddled’ through a legislature,—that is, neither party takes the responsibility, but the boss of each machine assigns to vote for them all the men whose seats are secure beyond any ordinary assault of public indignation. . . the eleven…men assigned to vote for the bill would vote against it unless he got seven thousand dollars apiece [$176,000 today!] for them,—seventy-seven thousand dollars” (pp.33-34). Were Phillips alive today, he would feel right at home.