Thomas
Lawson was a millionaire businessman who had made a fortune from the
stock-market. Upset by the way that some of the leading business leaders
had been behaving he approached John O'Hara Cosgrave, the editor of
Everybody's Magazine, about
him writing a series of articles on the subject. He agreed and the
first of these articles appeared in July, 1904. The series ran for
20 months and gave examples of how corporations had bribed judges
and politicians.
Lawson spent over $250,000 of his own money to advertise the series.
He hoped that President Theodore Roosevelt
would take up the case and "would shake the largest trusts and
corporations until their teeth chattered and their backbones rattled
like hung dried corn in a fireplace when the wind gets at it".
Lawson was disappointed by the impact his articles had on public opinion
and he returned to gambling on the stock-market.
(1)
Thomas Lawson, Everybody's Magazine
(July, 1904)
Through its workings during
the last twenty years there has grown up in this country a set of
colossal corporations in which unmeasured success and continued immunity
from punishment have bread an insolent disregard of law, of common
morality, and of public and private right, together with a grim determination
to hold on to, at all hazards, the great possessions they have gulped
or captured. It is the same "System" which has taken from
the millions of our people billions of dollars and given them over
to a score or two of men with power to use and enjoy them as absolutely
as through these billions had been earned dollar by dollar by the
labour of their bodies and their minds.
(2)
Thomas Lawson, Everybody's Magazine
(July, 1904)
All financial institutions
which in any way are engaged in taking from the people the money that
is their surplus earnings or capital, for the ostensible purpose of
safe-guarding it, or putting it in use for them, or exchanging it
for stocks, bonds, policies, or other paper evidences of worth, are
a part of the machinery for the plundering of the people.
(3)
Thomas Lawson, Everybody's Magazine
(14th February, 1906)
This sumptuous scene (Sherry's
banquet-hall), this matchless luxury, were paid for out of dollars,
blood and tear-soaked, wrung cent by cent from the honest toilers
of the land - that these dollars meant sacrifice and abstinence, chilled
bodies and scant food, fireless hearths and dreary days - all that
there might be of a widow's mite or an orphan's livelihood - a fierce
rage rose within me.
(4)
Thomas Lawson, Everybody's Magazine
(18th February, 1908)
I have devoted three and a
half years of my time and some millions of my fortune to reform work
in the interests of the public. Beginning January 1st, I shall allow
the public to do their own reforming, and I shall devote my time and
capital exclusively to my own business of stock "gambling"
in wall and State Streets - particularly Wall Street - for the purpose
of recouping the millions I have donated to my public work.
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