IX

Now to disentangle the principal events, bring them out of the mist and relate them in a coherent manner.

The state bank was the beginning; it was also the end. Capuchin named it the People’s Bank of the State of New Freedom. It got its capital from the state to begin with and the state guaranteed its deposits. For president he chose a man named Parshall, who had a small National bank in a nearby town but was much more interested in politics than in banking. Long before this he had attached himself to the Freemen’s League, believing it would come to control the state, as it had, and thinking it might reward him for his services. His bank was one of the few places where Capuchin had been able to get cash on the League members’ post-dated checks. Parshall cashed them, in fact, until the Federal bank examiner threatened to shut him up.

The League did reward him, though much below his expectations, by electing him to the legislature. He was still hopeful. He did not particularly wish to become head of the bank. Capuchin pressed him, however, and he accepted. Capuchin wanted him in the job because he was a reasonable man.

But to set up a bank you need more than a charter, a sum of capital and a figurehead. You require, besides, organization, personnel, rules, methods, working policies and what not. A very complicated mechanism it is, not so much in principle as in part and detail. Dwind had framed the principles. Lesser and other experts were needed for the rest. Parshall was incompetent even to visualize the problem. There was plenty of banking talent in the state, none of it available. It was either too unfriendly to be willing to help or so willing as to be open to suspicion. No sabotage here.

Capuchin appealed to Jael. Had she this talent in her Lothian College? She had. From the faculty, the student body and the alumni it was picked and sent out to him. Some of it was loaned; some of it was to be retained permanently in the service of New Freedom.

From this precedent a practice developed.

The next problem in the affairs of the bank was to organize a farm loan bureau. Agricultural loans represent one of the separate anxieties of banking. The demand for them was tremendous, and it had to be met. This was the people’s bank. Was it not their own credit the farmers were asking for? But if it were simply dealt out to them on request, as they expected, there would soon be nothing left for other purposes, such as the state elevators and the state flour mill. Here was a dangerous riddle. Had the Lothian College some farm loan experts? It certainly had, for it was taking just then special pains to study the mind of the radical western farmer. So another lot of brains was dispatched from New York to New Freedom, some loaned and some to stay, as before.

Then as the implications of putting a state into business began vaguely to be realized by Capuchin, who himself knew nothing of business on the practical side, he asked for experts in such matter as production, distribution, co-operative buying and selling, cost accounting, management, transportation, price phenomena, construction.

The science of economics opened up to him like a new book, enchanting and mysterious. He drew a chart. At the top a board of advisers. Below, a series of bureaus, one for each department of specialized economic knowledge. These bureaus were to have the last word of wisdom on the subject given.

It should work like this: Take the flour mill. First the state says there shall be a flour mill. That is a question of public policy. Very good. Then it goes to the board of economic advisers. The board calls on the bureau of—of—of what? One has been left out. There must be a bureau of general survey to know every physical fact about the state of course.

Now—the board of economic advisers calls upon the bureau of general survey to say where the flour mill shall be put, then on the bureau of production to say how large the mill shall be in view of the country’s total flour production and probable increase of demand, then on the bureau of distribution to say where and how the flour shall be sold, and so on, until you come to the bureau of construction, which is to build it, and will know of course the latest and most efficient thing in the shape of a flour mill; last of all the bureau of management which is to say how the mill shall be operated. All scientific!

Nearly all of these advisers and bureau heads the Lothian College provided. There was consequently much going to and fro, with never fewer than ten of the Lothian faculty on the western scene either as helpers loaned or as observers, so that Jael at length took a large house in Liberty, furnished and staffed it, and made it a rendezvous and club.

She passed a good deal of time there herself, especially in summer; so did various members of the Jones street company, as guests. There came also radical students of social science, honest seekers of the new way, from all over the country, then from all over the world as the noise spread. Her house in Liberty, where she entertained them all, or where they entertained themselves, came to be referred to as Little Jones street. Customs and manners were the same in both places.

New Freedom’s first year was one of great formations.

The state elevators began to rise.

The flour mill took form.

The Freemen’s League, on money borrowed at the bank, bought three newspapers in other towns and so gained complete control of the press throughout the state. There were no other papers to reckon with, only two or three weak ones, afraid to attack the League and not intelligent enough to do so effectively if they had possessed the courage.

There was a boom in private building, on borrowed money; and the demand for building materials was so great that Capuchin conceived the notion of co-operative lumber yards. He put it through the League, members subscribing the capital with post-dated checks; these were cashed at the People’s Bank.

A chain of co-operative retail stores was set up in the same way.

In the autumn the Legislature voted to build a state meat packing plant and three state creameries.

In the elections that year the League won everything it had not carried before; also it somewhat improved the average character of its office holders, everybody being now very serious.

There was one disagreeable fact, to be mentioned in its right place—that is to say, last. The state itself had borrowed so much money from the People’s Bank to carry on all these new affairs that in order to pay any of it back, to pay even the interest, it was obliged to increase taxation.

In the second year all prospects broadened, though nothing yet was quite realized. The elevators were finished and began to receive grain. However, the true use and benefit of them could not be fairly tested. The grain crop at large was short and dear. New Freedom had the luck to bring off a good crop and sold it out of the fields at high prices. There was no need for much storage; and the private elevator people paid as much for grain as the state elevators paid, sometimes a little more. When they paid more it was supposed that capital was in a conspiracy to discredit the people’s experiment.

The flour mill was completed and about ready to be brought into operation. The meat packing plant and the three creameries were building.

The Legislature voted itself an increase of pay, voted also a subsidy to be paid to the sugar beet growers on the ground that the price they received from the refiners for their beets was unfair; it appointed a commission to report a plan for a ten-million dollar state-owned beet sugar factory, which of course would pay a fair price for beets.

Again to be mentioned last was the aggravation of a cumulative fact. The state’s borrowing from the People’s Bank had enormously increased; the cost of administering public affairs had risen prodigiously. It was necessary to double taxes.

Capuchin tried in every way to avoid this. He had caused the state to offer a bond issue in the east—bonds of New Freedom, guaranteed by the People’s Bank, secured by the thrift and assets of a happy people. But as Dwind had told him in Jael’s house two years before, the east would not touch the bonds. To save the issue from disgrace the People’s Bank bought most of it. That was a stupid thing to do. The strain upon its resources was already terrific.

Nevertheless, the third year was one of ecstasy. For one thing, the idea of the Freemen’s League had begun to sell in an amazing manner outside of the state. The apparent prosperity of New Freedom’s farmers plus the zealotry of Capuchin’s highly drilled body of canvassers made it sell among the radical-minded farmers elsewhere.

It assumed suddenly a formidable political shape. Demagogic politicians were counting it. A member of the United States Senate, big enough to think of himself as a candidate for president, began to make speeches endorsing its aims. All of this gave the people of New Freedom, the Leaguers, that is, a sense of vast importance in their home-made political clothes. They were path breakers to a new time. They had, beyond their own concerns, an errand to go for the common good. A destiny, perhaps; a luminous place in history. The religious projection occurred. That they were performing an economic miracle was not enough to believe. They were overcoming a principle of evil. They became intolerant of doubt and heresy, bigots, fanatics, mystics.

And now Capuchin began to appear in a magnified form before them. In the beginning his contacts with them were all personal, his words with them informal and conversational. Then as creative activities more absorbed him contacts of any kind began to be neglected and that was bad.

Suddenly he got the notion of arranging mass picnics. Leaguers and their friends to the number of several thousand at a time were gathered up on special trains and taken to see the flour mill or the meat packing plant. Everything was free, including the barbecue.

They were treated as masters of all they saw. To the superintendent of the flour mill they spoke as if he were working for each one of them personally. They admired the evidence of their power, ran their fingers through the flour—their flour! their grain! their own mill grinding it!—and were satisfied. At the meat packing plant they saw strings of refrigerator cars loading dressed beef for export to Europe, and were thrilled.

They forgot that they themselves were paying for everything, including the railroad fares and the barbecue. All such expenditures had to come out of taxes. They did not know their flour was selling at a loss for the reason that the cost of making it was more than flour was worth. Nor did they know that those iced cars full of dressed beef often returned as they went away, that is, full, because the product was not sold and there was nothing to do but to bring it back and burn it. Thousands of tons of it had already been destroyed in that way secretly.

It was perhaps just as well they did not know. These were festive occasions. Capuchin invariably appeared before the picnic was over and made them a speech that moved them higher in self-satisfaction. One day he arrived and departed by airplane. This dramatized him properly in the popular sense; it proved what a busy and omnipresent person he was. The effect was so satisfying that he adopted that mode of personal transportation.

In the same way he brought Freemen’s Leaguers and their friends from other states to wonder at New Freedom’s things, so that they might see for themselves what they could do when they had become strong enough to take control of their own. That was advertising; it helped to sell the League afar. Who paid the outsiders’ expenses in and back was never quite clear.