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96 c h a p t e r t h r e e Improper Wealth Getting Henry James, the Rise of Finance Capitalism, and the Emerging Global Cultural Economy I n A Hazard of New Fortunes, what prompts Lindau’s outburst that the state is the solution to existing social problems is a discussion about the dangers of monopolies that Colonel Woodburn starts at Dryfoos’s dinner party. Tellingly, it is the socially conservative Colonel Woodburn, not the radical immigrant Lindau, who gives voice to the fear that unregulated competition necessarily leads to monopolies: “The infernal impulse of competition ha[s] embroiled us in a perpetual warfare of interests, developing the worst passions of our nature, and teaching us to trick and betray and destroy one another in the strife for money, till now that impulse ha[s] exhausted itself, and we [find] competition gone and the whole economic problem in the hands of monopolies—the Standard Oil Company, the Sugar Trust, the Rubber Trust, and what not.”1 The kind of anxiety that Colonel Woodburn expresses in this passage has long been regarded as one of the primary motivations for the Progressive movement itself. In his classic study entitled The Age of Reform, for example, Richard Hofstadter describes a weak and frequently corrupt political system “of diffused power and unorganized strength” into which “the great corporations and investment houses had now thrust themselves, gigantic units commanding vast resources and quite capable of buying up political support on a wholesale basis, just as they bought their other supplies. The Progressives were thus haunted by the specter of a private power far greater than the public power of the state.”2 Hofstadter goes on to claim that, in contrast to earlier periods of limited government, Progressives initiated a trend of seeking “in governmental action a counterpoise to the power of private business . . . , which found its beginnings in the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 and the Sherman Act of 1890.”3 Although the U.S. Supreme Court eventually issued decisions that severely limited both acts, the ratifications Henry James 97 of the Interstate Commerce Act and the Sherman Antitrust Act serve as watershed moments in many histories of Progressivism, and they paved the way for future federal regulation of American business. The somewhat surprising political alignment that occurs between the conservative Colonel Woodburn and the radical Lindau in A Hazard of New Fortunes gives a sense of just how widespread the anxiety that Hofstadter describes already was when William Dean Howells began serializing his novel in 1889. This passage also indicates the degree to which Howells himself may have hoped that his American readers, more of whom probably would have identified with Colonel Woodburn than with Lindau, would be willing to rethink their own assumptions about the free market and state regulation if it meant curtailing the various “trusts” that Colonel Woodburn names. In having Colonel Woodburn characterize free-market competition as a “strife for money” that inevitably “exhausts itself” and results in monopoly, Howells anticipates the logic of a number of Progressives, including most notably Louis D. Brandeis, who sought to convince their fellow Americans that only state regulation of a newer and even more troubling form of monopoly could ensure the continued stability—and thus the global supremacy—of the U.S. national economy. The so-called Money Trust may not appear on Colonel Woodburn’s list, but growing concern over the rise of finance capitalism—what, in his influential work Other People ’s Money and How the Bankers Use It (1913–14), Brandeis called “improper wealth getting”—seems to have prompted just the kind of rethinking of American big business that A Hazard of New Fortunes calls for.4 Perhaps the most recursive example of this rethinking plays out in one of the period’s most heavily revised works of American literature: the version of Henry James’s The American that appeared in 1907. Originally serialized in the Atlantic Monthly between June 1876 and May 1877, The American was revised extensively by its author when he prepared it for inclusion in the New York Edition.5 Long regarded as “the most rewritten” of all James’s novels, the 1907 version of The American has attracted considerable critical attention, primarily for the insights its revisions provide into James’s thirtyyear evolution as an artist.6 James seems to have anticipated the interest that his decision to revise The American and some of his other early novels...

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