The business man is the national hero of America, as native to the soil and as typical of the country as
baseball or Broadway or big advertising. He is an interesting figure, picturesque and not unlovable, not so
dashing perhaps as a knight in armor or a soldier in uniform, but he is not without the noble (and ignoble)
qualities which have characterized the tribe of man since the world began. America, in common with other
countries, has had distinguished statesmen and soldiers, authors and artists—and they have not all gone to
their graves unhonored and unsung—but the hero story which belongs to her and to no one else is the story of
the business man.
Nearly always it has had its beginning in humble surroundings, with a little boy born in a log cabin in the
woods, in a wretched shanty at the edge of a field, in a crowded tenement section or in the slums of a foreign
city, who studied and worked by daylight and firelight while he made his living blacking boots or selling
papers until he found the trail by which he could climb to what we are pleased to call success. Measured by
the standards of Greece and Rome or the Middle Ages, when practically the only form of achievement worth
mentioning was fighting to kill, his career has not been a romantic one. It has had to do not with dragons and
banners and trumpets, but with stockyards and oil fields, with railroads, sewer systems, heat, light, and water
plants, telephones, cotton, corn, ten−cent stores and—we might as well make a clean breast of it—chewing
gum.
We have no desire to crown the business man with a halo, though judging from their magazines and from
the stories which they write of their own lives, they are almost without spot or blemish. Most of them seem
not even to have had faults to overcome. They were born perfect. Now the truth is that the methods of
accomplishment which the American business man has used have not always been above reproach and still
are not. At the same time it would not be hard to prove that he—and here we are speaking of the
average—with all his faults and failings (and they are many), with all his virtues (and he is not without them),
is superior in character to the business men of other times in other countries. This without boasting. It would
be a great pity if he were not.
Without trying to settle the question as to whether he is good or bad (and he really can be pigeon−holed no
better than any one else) we have to accept this: He is the biggest factor in the American commonwealth
to−day. It follows then, naturally, that what he thinks and feels will color and probably dominate the ideas and
the ideals of the rest of the country. Numbers of our magazines—and they are as good an index as we have to
the feeling of the general public—are given over completely to the service or the entertainment of business
men (the T. B. M.) and an astonishing amount of space is devoted to them in most of the others.
It may be, and as a matter of fact constantly is, debated whether all this is good for the country or not. We
shall not go into that. It has certainly been good for business, and in considering the men who have developed
our industries we have to take them, and maybe it is just as well, as they are and not as we think they ought to
be.
There was a time when the farmer was the principal citizen. And the politician ingratiated himself with the
people by declaring that he too had split rails and followed the plow, had harvested grain and had suffered
from wet spells and dry spells, low prices, dull seasons, hunger and hardship. This is still a pretty sure way to
win out, but there are others. If he can refer feelingly to the days when he worked and sweated in a coal mine,
in a printing shop, a cotton, wool, or silk mill, steel or motor plant, he can hold his own with the ex−farmer's
boy. We have become a nation of business men. Even the “dirt” farmer has become a business man—he has
learned that he not only has to produce, he must find a market for his product.
In comparing the business man of the present with the business man of the past we must remember that he
is living in a more difficult world. Life was comparatively simple when men dressed in skins and ate roots and
had their homes in scattered caves. They felt no need for a code of conduct because they felt no need for one
another. They depended not on humanity but on nature, and perhaps human brotherhood would never have
come to have a meaning if nature had not proved treacherous. She gave them berries and bananas, sunshine
and soft breezes, but she gave them trouble also in the shape of wild beasts, and savages, terrible droughts,
winds, and floods. In order to fight against these enemies, strength was necessary, and when primitive men
discovered that two were worth twice as much as one they began to join forces. This was the beginning of
civilization and of politeness. It rose out of the oldest instinct in the world—self−preservation.
When men first organized into groups the units were small, a mere handful of people under a chief, but
gradually they became larger and larger until the nations of to−day have grown into a sort of world
community composed of separate countries, each one supreme in its own domain, but at the same time bound
to the others by economic ties stronger than sentimental or political ones could ever be. People are now more
dependent on one another than they have ever been before, and the need for confidence is greater. We cannot
depend upon one another unless we can trust one another.
The American community is in many respects the most complex the world has ever seen, and the hardest
to manage. In other countries the manners have been the natural result of the national development. The
strong who had risen to the top in the struggle for existence formed themselves into a group. The weak who
stayed at the bottom fell into another, and the bulk of the populace, which, then as now, came somewhere in
between, fell into a third or was divided according to standards of its own. Custom solidified the groups into
classes which became so strengthened by years of usage that even when formal distinctions were broken down
the barriers were still too solid for a man who was born into a certain group to climb very easily into the one
above him. Custom also dictated what was expected of the several classes. Each must be gracious to those
below and deferential to those above. The king, because he was king, must be regal. The nobility must,
noblesse oblige, be magnificent, and as for the rest of the people, it did not matter much so long as they
worked hard and stayed quiet. There were upheavals, of course, and now and then a slave with a braver heart
and a stouter spirit than his companions incited them to rebellion. His head was chopped off for his pains and
he was promptly forgotten. The majority of the people for thousands of years honestly believed that this was
the only orderly basis upon which society could be organized.
Nebulous ideas of a brotherhood, in which each man was to have an equal chance with every other, burned
brightly for a little while in various parts of the world at different times, and flickered out. They broke forth
with the fury of an explosion in France during the Revolution and in Russia during the Red Terror. They have
smoldered quietly in some places and had just begun to break through with a steady, even flame. But America
struck the match and gathered the wood to start her own fire. She is the first country in the world which was
founded especially to promote individual freedom and the brotherhood of mankind. She had, to change the
figure slightly, a blue−print to start with and she has been building ever since.
Her material came from the eastern hemisphere. The nations there at the time when the United States was
settled were at different stages of their development. Some were vigorous with youth, some were in the height
of their glory, and some were dying because the descendants of the men who had made them great were futile
and incapable. These nations were different in race and religion, in thought, language, traditions, and
temperament. When they were not quarreling with each other, they were busy with domestic squabbles. They
had kept this up for centuries and were at it when the settlers landed at Jamestown and later when the
Mayflower came to Plymouth Rock. Yet, with a cheerful disregard of the past and an almost sublime hope in
the future they expected to live happily ever after they crossed the Atlantic Ocean. Needless to add, they did
not.
Accident of place cannot change a man's color (though it may bleach it a shade lighter or tan it a shade
darker), nor his religion nor any of the other racial and inherent qualities which are the result of slow centuries
of development. And the same elements which made men fight in the old countries set them against each
other in the new. Most of the antagonisms were and are the result of prejudices, foolish narrow prejudices,
which, nevertheless, must be beaten down before we can expect genuine courtesy.