Forgotten Man, The by Amity Shlaes Read Free Book Online

on trains to Vladivostok, but the Russian experts were brutalized or even killed. What made it worse was that without the experts the delicate Kyshtim furnaces broke down within a week; the Communists could not read the blueprints left behind that would have told them how to do repair work. “In a week the works were shut down, and 100,000 people were destitute,” Hoover recalled, rightfully disgusted, in his memoir. After that Hoover led a great relief action in “Bololand,” the nickname the relief staff used for the Bolshevik state. But unlike Henry Ford, he did not nurse much hope that doing business with Russia would bring Bolsheviks back to market ways.
    By age thirty-five or forty Hoover still feared criticism, but less than before—he encountered it so infrequently. Luck and talent had done their work, and he began to feel his greatness was unlimited. Not only Americans but also foreigners had the same impression. Getting to know Hoover at the peace conference after World War I, the economist John Maynard Keynes was deeply impressed. For Hoover grasped what others had missed: the crushing blow that the reparations payments demanded by France would deal to thefuture of Germany. Hoover, Keynes said, operated in “an atmosphere of reality, knowledge, magnanimity and disinterestedness, which, if they had been found in other quarters also, would have given us the Good Peace.” Others might live lives of periodic setbacks; Hoover seemed immune. Sherwood Anderson, the novelist who chronicled such setbacks in Winesburg, Ohio, would write with astonishment that Hoover’s was the face of a man who “had never known failure.”
    All the while, four characteristics made Hoover subtly different from some of the others, especially from Mellon. The first was that he was younger, born in 1874, which made him a full generation younger than Mellon. His world was more Edwardian than frontier or Victorian; the experience of the war had made a big impression on him. Hoover came to believe that life was like wartime, and that government, therefore, ought to plan more, as if in a war. The second was his love of publicity. The third difference was that Hoover, who had profited so much from commodities, tended to distrust Wall Street, whose wealth he viewed as ephemeral. The fourth was that Hoover loved to jump in where, say Mellon, had stayed back. That was why he had been so successful as a consultant.
    Under Harding, the differences between Hoover on the one hand and Mellon and Coolidge on the other became more visible, at least for those who looked carefully. Mellon, true to form, had focused on allowing businesses to work on their own, which to him meant reducing taxes. Income taxes in those days applied only to the rich—and those rich paid extremely high rates, the top being 73 percent. Mellon believed that rate was prohibitive—it killed investment, and therefore jobs. He did not see taxation as a moral matter. Taxes were a practical thing: a tax was a price. And one could only charge “what the traffic will bear,” as he put it, drawing on a metaphor from his own railroad freight days. When a government overtaxed, it hurt itself, for it got less revenue. Taxes that were too high, Mellon noted, simply were not paid. In the end lawmakers wrote loopholes that enabled high earners to escape. Instantly, with the aid of his staff, Mellon began to work on plans to cut taxes. Overtaxation was the very sort of intervention hehad abhorred as a venture capitalist, and he would do what he could to reduce it from Washington.
    Mellon’s other preoccupation was with the efficient use of family money—his own, and that of other people. Money, he believed, must stay in the private sector, with the family, either for further investment, or for one’s children, or for charity. He had watched in admiration—and perhaps envy—as his friend Henry Clay Frick built up his art collection. Every once in a while a headline trumpeted “Another