BUSINESS AND THE LIFE OF THE MIND Jll
fresh from California, asked Jay Gould at a New York dinner party for a "tip" on the market. The man who "knew" stated the exact opposite of the truth, namely, that he was buying Vandalia Railroad and selling Western Union. Joaquin Miller, taking the tip, had his fingers burned; in fact, by following Gould's tricky lead, he lost most of his fortune. The Destruction of Gotham was Miller's reply. In this novel the poet of the Sierras excoriated the iniquities of the stock exchange and the class identified with it. Such examples could be multiplied.
While many writers spent their talents in ridiculing and condemning the moneyed class, in emphasizing the withering effects of unrestrained competition for gold, others took the part of the laborers. The Atlantic Monthly published Rebecca Harding Davis's "Life in the Iron Mills," an early portrait, fierce and stark, of the lot of the industrial worker. Seven years later the same periodical brought to the public a story in which the brutalizing insecurity of labor was dramatically depicted when a factory collapsed, with its inevitable havoc to lives already twisted by deprivation and toil. The author, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, again pleaded for Christian justice to the mill worker in a subsequent piece of fiction, The Silent Partner (1871). Less unctuous than this Puritan idyll was Edward Bellamy's The Duke of Stockbridge (1879). Far from flawless as a piece of literature, this historical novel of Shays' rebellion nonetheless revealed a fairly acute understanding of exploitation, injustice, and revolt. These works showing humane sympathy for the underdog and criticizing sharply the ways of the rich were merely the beginnings of a crop of novels, stories, and essays which in the 1880s and 1890s testified to the sympathies of a great company of American writers.
If some intellectuals contented themselves with literary onslaughts against the new business class and with sympathetic portraits of industrial workers, others went further. In California in 1871, Henry George, who had known the sting of poverty in that land of fabulous wealth, published a little tract that contained the germ of the single-tax idea and of the movement subsequently launched in its behalf. About the same time the veteran abolitionist, Wendell Phillips, was striking out boldly on new paths. Refusing to share the contentment displayed by most of his fellow workers in the antislavery crusade, Phillips continued to condemn intellectuals for their indifference toward new social evils, He himself bestowed sympathy on the movement for the eight-hour day, spoke and labored for a cooperative system of production, and demanded