U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [570]
about trustbusting, control ing monopoly, the public good) and raised Samuel Insul to the peak.
He was head of the Il inois State Council of De-fense. Now, he said delightedly, I can do anything I like. With it came the perpetual spotlight, the purple taste of empire. If anybody didn't like what Samuel
-527-Insul did he was a traitor. Chicago damn wel kept its mouth shut. The Insul companies spread and merged put com-petitors out of business until Samuel Instul and his stooge brother Martin control ed through the leverage of holdingcompanies and directorates and blocks of
minority stock
light and power, coalmines and tractioncompanies
in Il inois, Michigan, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Ar-kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Maine, Kansas, Wiscon-sin, Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Texas, in Canada, in Louisiana, in Georgia, in Florida and Alabama.
(It has been figured out that one dol ar in Middle
West Utilities control ed seventeen hundred and fifty dol ars invested by the public in the subsidiary com-panies that actual y did the work of producing elec-tricity. With the delicate lever of a voting trust con-trol ing the stock of the two top holdingcompanies he control ed a twelfth of the power output of America.) Samuel Insul began to think he owned al that
the way a man owns the rol of bil s in his back pocket. Always he'd been scornful of bankers. He owned
quite a few in Chicago. But the New York bankers
were laying for him; they felt he was a bounder, whis-pered that this financial structure was unsound. Fin-gers itched to grasp the lever that so delicately moved this enormous power over lives,
superpower, Insul liked to cal it.
A certain Cyrus S. Eaton of Cleveland, an ex-Baptistminister, was the David that brought down this Goliath. Whether it was so or not he made Insul be-lieve that Wal Street was behind him. He started buying stock in the three Chicago
-528-utilities. Insul in a panic for fear he'd lose his control went into the market to buy against him. Final y the Reverend Eaton let himself be bought out, shaking down the old man for a profit of twenty mil ion dol-lars. The stockmarket crash. Paper values were slipping. Insul 's companies
were intertwined in a tangle that no bookkeeper has ever been able to unravel. The gas hissed out of the torn bal oon. Insul
threw away his imperial pride and went on his knees to the bankers.
The bankers had him where they wanted him. To
save the face of the tottering czar he was made a re-ceiver of his own concerns. But the old man couldn't get out of his head the il usion that the money was al his. When it was discovered that he was using the
stockholders' funds to pay off his brothers' brokerage accounts it was too thick even for a federal judge. In-sul was forced to resign. He held directorates in eightyfive companies, he
was chairman of sixtyfive, president of eleven: it took him three hours to sign his resignations.
As a reward for his services to monopoly his com-panies chipped in on a pension of eighteen thousand a year. But the public was shouting for criminal prosecu-tion. When the handouts stopped newspapers and poli-ticians turned on him. Revolt against the moneymanip-ulators was in the air. Samuel Insul got the wind up and ran off to Canada with his wife.
Extradition proceedings. He fled to Paris. When
the authorities began to close in on him there he slipped away to Italy, took a plane to Tirana, another to Sa-loniki and then the train to Athens. There the old fox went to earth. Money talked as sweetly in Athens as it had in Chicago in the old days.
-529-The American ambassador tried to extradite him. Insul hired a chorus of Hel enic lawyers and politicos and sat drinking coffee in the lobby of the Grande Bretagne, while they proceeded to tie up the ambas-sador in a snarl of chicanery as complicated as the book-keeping of his holdingcompanies. The successors of Demosthenes were delighted. The ancestral itch in
many a Hel enic palm was temporarily assuaged. Sam-uel Insul settled down cozily