U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [569]
the deputies crowd in the door
we have only words against
POWER SUPERPOWER
In eighteen eighty when Thomas Edison's agent
was hooking up the first telephone in London, he put an ad in the paper for a secretary and stenographer. The eager young cockney with sprouting muttonchop
whiskers who answered it
had recently lost his job as officeboy. In his spare time he had been learning shorthand and bookkeeping and taking dictation from the editor of the English Vanity Fair at night and jotting down the speeches in Parliament for the papers. He came of temperance smal shopkeeper stock; already he was butting his
bul ethead against the harsh structure of caste that doomed boys of his class to a lifo of alpaca jackets, pen-manship, subordination. To get a job with an American firm was to put a foot on the rung of a ladder that led up into the blue.
He did his best to make himself indispensable;
they let him operate the switchboard for the first half-hour when the telephone service was opened. Edison noticed his weekly reports on the electrical situation in England and sent for him to be his personal secretary.
-525-Samuel Insul landed in America on a raw March day in eightyone. Immediately he was taken out to
Menlo Park, shown about the little group of labora-tories, saw the strings of electriclightbulbs shining at in-tervals across the snowy lots, al lit from the world's first central electric station. Edison put him right to work and he wasn't through til midnight. Next morn-ing at six he was on the job; Edison had no use for any nonsense about hours or vacations. Insul worked from that time on until he was seventy without a break; no nonsense about hours or vacations. Electric power
turned the ladder into an elevator.
Young Insul made himself indispensable to Edi-son and took more and more charge of Edison's busi-ness deals. He was tireless, ruthless, reliable as the tides, Edison used to say, and fiercely determined to rise.
In ninetytwo he induced Edison to send him to
Chicago and put him in as president of the Chicago
Edison Company. Now he was on his own. My engi- neering, he said once in a speech, when he was suffi-ciently czar of Chicago to al ow himself the luxury of plain speaking, has been largely concerned with engi- neering all I could out of the dollar. He was a stiffly arrogant redfaced man with a
closecropped mustache; he lived on Lake Shore Drive and was at the office at 7:10
every morning. It took him fifteen years to merge the five electrical companies into the Commonwealth Edison Company. Very early I discovered that the first essential, as in other public. utility business, was that it should be operated as a monopoly. When his power was firm in electricity he captured
gas, spread out into the surrounding townships in
-526-northern Il inois. When politicians got in his way, he bought them, when laborleaders got in his way he
bought them. Incredibly his power grew. He was
scornful of bankers, lawyers were his hired men. He put his own lawyer in as corporation counsel and
through him ran Chicago. When he found to his
amazement that there were men (even a couple of
young lawyers, Richberg and Ickes) in Chicago that
he couldn't buy, he decided he'd better put on a show for the public; Big Bil Thompson, the Builder:
punch King George in the nose,
the hunt for the treeclimbing fish,
the Chicago Opera.
It was too easy; the public had money, there was
one of them born every minute, with the founding of Middlewest Utilities in nineteen twelve Insul began to use the public's money to spread his empire. His companies began to have open stockholders' meetings, to bal yhoo service, the smal investor could sit there al day hearing the bigwigs talk. It's fun to be fooled. Companyunions hypnotized his employees; everybody
had to buy stock in his companies, employees had to go out and sel stock, officeboys, linemen, trol ey-conductors. Even Owen D. Young was afraid of him. My experience is that the greatest aid in the efficiency of labor is a long line of men waiting at the gate. War shut up the