In 1945 Ayn Rand called Calumet “K” “my favorite thing in all world literature.” Rand’s novels idealized builders and industrial leaders, and rekindled support for an open, freewheeling American capitalism. In praising Calumet “K,” she had reached back to the turn of the century, an era far removed from the government triumphalism of the 1940s, to a novel that had been virtually forgotten. To a publisher, she wrote, “I’m sure it will appeal to all the readers of The Fountainhead. It’s that kind of thing.”

         The judgment was characteristic of Rand, who responded to heroism and a “sense of life.” In music, her favorites were light band numbers — “tiddlywink music,” she called them. Calumet “K” is tiddlywink music to the spirit of American industry.

         The book was given to Rand, then a young immigrant from Soviet Russia, by Cecil B. DeMille.[2] Its voice is folksy, midwest American. Its hero, Charlie Bannon, is a construction boss, sent to Chicago to ensure that a grain elevator is built on time. Bannon is indomitable. When his foreman says the top boss “can’t blame us” if the schedule slips, Bannon replies, “When I have to begin explaining to MacBride why it can’t be done, I’ll send my resignation along in a separate envelope and go to peddling a cure for corns. What we want to talk about is how we’re going to do it.”

         As Rand says, Bannon is an efficacious man. He might be a superintendent at one of Howard Roark’s building sites. But he is not a Roark; he is not a radical arrayed against the ideas of the day. He embodies them — at least, some of them.

         Calumet K” was published in 1901, in the late summer of laissez-faire. The book, wrote Rand, “captures the atmosphere — the sense of life — of a free country — what it was like, what it demanded of men…”[3] It is not the whole truth about industrial America, but an essential part that has largely been pushed aside. The book I was assigned in school was Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), a socialist’s story of immigrant Slavs sweating in the Chicago meat plants. From the same neighborhood, Merwin and Webster show the work of a purposeful boss. Bannon’s grain silo takes on the aura of a Roark skyscraper. He even hoists a woman sky-high in an open box, as in the final scene in The Fountainhead.

         Calumet “K” was noted by English playwright and novelist Arnold Bennett. In an essay in the North American Review, Bennett named it as the “prototypical specimen” of the new romantic American novel.[4]

         Cultural historian Vernon Parrington condemned it. Though Bannon “has no time nor inclination to think [and] possesses no philosophy,” Parrington wrote, Calumet “K” and its predecessor, The Short-Line War (1899) “present the ideal of a competitive bourgeoisie” to prevail over others. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning Main Currents in American Thought (1927) Parrington wrote, “No more heartless, brutal, anarchistic books could be conceived — a mad philosophy for a mad world.”[5] It’s the same hostility Rand would spark years later.

         Rand rescued Calumet “K” from oblivion and wrote a glowing introduction to it. But she said nothing of Merwin’s and Webster’s other books. She said almost nothing of the two men — not even their first names — and nothing of their ideas.

         There are no ideas discussed in Calumet “K.” But ideas aplenty are scattered through books Merwin and Webster wrote later. Their literary method grew less like Rand’s, but some of their ideas — Webster’s, if not Merwin’s —  are much like hers.

         Samuel Merwin (1874-1936) and Henry Kitchell Webster (1875-1932) were boyhood friends. They grew up in Evanston, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, which was then rising to challenge the dominance of the East. As schoolboys, they collaborated on plays, edited an amateur magazine and penned a book of verse. At a time when only 3 percent of Americans attended college, they both did, Merwin at Northwestern and Webster at Hamilton College near his father’s hometown of Utica, N.Y. They married college roommates, and stayed lifelong friends.

         Their start as writers was influenced by Webster’s father. T.K. Webster was a self-educated manufacturer of engine parts, grain elevator components and, unhappily, the Paige Compositor, a linotype machine that was too expensive to produce. Mark Twain was an investor in that, and went broke — and T.K. nearly did. T.K. was more of a businessman than Twain, but his son wrote, “He never made a conservative investment in his life.”

         In politics, T.K. was a progressive Republican. He brought his son home from college to vote for William McKinley and the gold standard in 1896, and stumped for Teddy Roosevelt on the “Bull Moose” ticket in 1912. In a speech to the City Club of Chicago, his son recalled, T.K. argued that “no industry could be self-respecting that didn’t pay better than a bare living wage.” In the 1890s he insured his workers for industrial accidents, breaking ranks with his fellow manufacturers. T.K.’s attitude toward unions is evident in Calumet “K.” When the union delegate makes a demand related to safety, Bannon readily agrees; when the delegate defends a worker who endangered others, Bannon fights him. T.K. got along with unions for many years, but finally reached an impasse and moved his factory to Ohio.

         T.K. accepted that his son would be a writer. “He never asked me to report progress, never gave me unsolicited advice, never offered me any small errands or chores to do for him ‘if I hadn’t anything else to do,’ ” Webster wrote.

         Collaboration was common among beginning authors. To compose their first book, The Short-Line War, one account goes, “the two young men shut themselves into a room, and Webster, smoking a corncob, would formulate sentences in his mind.”[6] On this and later collaborations their names appeared as “Merwin-Webster.” Many a reader would assume that it was one author.

         As they wrote, T.K. read each chapter. He must have been pleased. When the manuscript was done, he took it to New York, presented it to the Macmillan publishing house, and sent for the young men. “Father had been paying Sam an allowance to enable him to go on working on the book, and his telegram he offered to pay Sam’s expenses to New York,” Webster wrote. “This…was Sam’s escape from Evanston.”[7 ]Webster, for all his world travels, would always live in Evanston, and in 1930 was still in the house built by his grandfather.

         The Short Line War concerns a fight for control of a Chicago railroad. The style and characterization are rough, but the story is full of action. Rivals lock up blocks of stock, issue new shares, buy judges and send out trains of armed men. The focus, however, lurches between the railroad industrialist and his assistant. The climax is short-circuited by a politician who calls in the governor. 

         But the story connected with the American public. Merwin and Webster, said a contemporary blurb, had “discovered in the exciting movements of trade and finance a field of fiction hitherto overlooked by American writers, but containing a great wealth of romance.”[8] Scott Dalrymple, the author of a recent Ph.D. thesis of the turn-of-the-century business novel, wrote that Merwin and Webster “may be said to have invented the genre” of the business romance.[9]

         Vernon Parrington wrote that Merwin and Webster’s “popular success was immediate and maintained surprisingly.” The Short-Line War was in print until 1909.[10]

         Calumet “K,” their second collaboration, was simpler and more tightly focused. It had sharp detail grounded in the experience of T.K., who had built a grain elevator in England. And at a time when business was under attack in the name of the common good, it presented a counter-ideal. In Merwin and Webster’s hands, Dalrymple writes, the silo became “a metaphor for human achievement…as much a parable about the value of hard work and tenacity as anything from the pen of Benjamin Franklin.”

         Calumet “K” appeared in The Saturday Evening Post from May 25 to August 17, 1901. It boosted the magazine’s circulation, and in book form it was in print into the 1920s. Rand had it reprinted in 1967, and her admirers at Second Renaissance Books reprinted a hardbound replica edition in 1993 that is still available.

         Merwin and Webster separately wrote other business romances. Webster’s The Banker and the Bear (1900), Roger Drake: Captain of Industry (1902) and A King in Khaki (1909) hold up better than Merwin’s The Whip Hand (1903) and The Road Builders (1906). Webster’s stories have more substance. They also have an impish humor. In The Banker and the Bear, a young woman is named Dick, because her older brothers are Tom and Harry. The struggle between “The Banker” and “The Bear” is over the price of a most inglorious commodity, lard — i.e., pig fat. When the agents of “The Bear” move on the commodity pit, Webster writes, “They sold actual lard, wholly imaginary lard, grotesque prophecies of lard…’’[11]

         By today’s standards, Webster is less politically correct about the common man. In Calumet “K,” Bannon is proud of his men’s work, but the way they gulp down the slogans of the union delegate shows him that “most of ’em have gunpowder in place of brains.”[12] That’s Webster talking. Two decades later, in Joseph Greer and his Daughter, Joe Greer says the same thing about the North Dakota farmers, who gulp down the slogans of socialist A.C. Townley’s Non-Partisan League. The farmers “aren’t willing to think,” says Greer. “All they’re willing to do is make trouble for the men who do think.”[13]

         Greer later observes that his chauffeur has plenty of free time to improve himself, and that “if he isn’t any good, he has a handsome chance to go to the devil.” He adds, “But that’s no concern of mine.” (The chauffeur later becomes an airmail pilot and marries Greer’s daughter.)

         A woman reminds Greer of the man in the Bible who said he wasn’t his brother’s keeper. “That was Cain,” he replies. But Cain, he says, wasn’t being criticized for a lack of solicitousness. “He’d just murdered his brother and was trying to establish an alibi.”[14]

         Merwin is less flippant and more solicitous of the little guy. He may not focus his stories on the down-and-out, but he makes a point of caring about them. Webster doesn’t. In A King in Khaki, Smith, the manager of a private Caribbean island, fights a director’s scheme to trick the company’s small investors — “preachers and schoolteachers” — through insider trading. Smith fights for the investors not because they are small, but because, he tells the director, “they are the real owners of this island, just as you are the owner of your watch.”[15]

         Webster’s businessmen do think about the morality of their actions. In Roger Drake, an industrialist’s memoirs of building a copper and railroad empire out west, the industrialist pauses to consider a bribe he’s just paid. “I had never trafficked in men’s consciences,” he says. “This is not pretending, mind you, that I did not sometimes buy what ought never to be for sale…But I never paid money for what wasn’t in the market, for anything which, if not mine at my price, wasn’t some other man’s at his.”[16]

         The bad guys in these stories use tactics forbidden today, such as fomenting a bank run (The Banker and the Bear), discriminatory freight rebating (Roger Drake), predatory price cutting (The Whip Hand), and refusal to deal (Calumet “K”). Some of these tactics were forbidden then, too, but a business response was usually quicker and more effective than filing a lawsuit. In The Whip Hand, a lumber man undercut by below-cost selling retaliates by secretly buying his competitor’s goods. In The Banker and the Bear, the banker stops a run of depositors by keeping his bank open in into the night and paying only in gold coin. Robbers being a more imminent danger than insolvency, the depositors go home.

         Webster is particularly accepting of all that comes with laissez-faire. After Roger Drake vanquishes his opponent, he buys up all the local mines and forms a modern, efficient copper trust. And after “the banker” beats “the bear,” the story ends happily as the banker’s client corners the market in pig fat.

         In politics, Merwin and Webster disagreed. Merwin was an early 20th century liberal; he once said his philosophy was mainly derived from John Stuart Mill, Bernard Shaw, Henrik Ibsen, Havelock Ellis and Ellen Key.[17] Merwin believed in the lifting of social repression. To him, the United States was “the most conservative country in the world, with the possible exception of China.” He was the nephew of a prominent suffragette, Frances Willard, and contributed to a book that promoted the vote for women.[18] In 1922 he publicly opposed an effort to censor books.[19]

         Merwin admired entrepreneurs but was against laissez-faire. He presented his politics with a blast in his political novel, The Citadel (1912), written at the peak of the Progressives’ crusade for the direct election of senators, the initiative and recall, municipal ownership and the federal income tax. The book’s protagonist, young Rep. John Garwood, is for all these things. He has a Progressive epiphany and runs for re-election as an independent. He champions an amendment to make the Constitution easier to amend — a proposal straight out of Theodore Roosevelt’s National Progressive Party platform of 1912.

         Garwood is a hero. Merwin has given him the same can-do spirit as Charlie Bannon, but instead of a grain elevator he’s building, it’s government. “The purpose of all vital government,” Garwood declares, “is to sit above and wield the greatest power in the land, whatever form that power may happen to take.” All that matters is that government be “expressive of nothing on earth but the will of the people at the moment.”[20]

         Garwood loses his seat. He loses, too, his fiancee, the delicate and fluff-headed daughter of a “standpat” industrialist. But he gains a wife, a modern-thinking biologist named Margaret, and sets off with her to campaign for the Progressive state.

         Reviewing this in The Smart Set, H.L. Mencken was surprisingly polite. His complaint was that The Citadel doesn’t explain why Garwood has his conversion. “Progressivism, in brief, is depicted as a disease of sudden and devastating onset,” Mencken wrote. “We see a representative of a safe and rotten borough suddenly run amuck, and are left wondering wherefore and why.” Mencken summed up: “Not a story of much depth and beam, to be sure, but still a pleasant one, and not as pontifical as it might have been.”[21]

         A dozen years later Merwin allowed he’d been “a bit naive,” but said, “I’m glad I once fought for something.”[22]

         Webster was not a joiner of causes, and less inclined to believe in the goodness of government. After traveling in Central America, he wrote, “Their ‘administration’ consists of those who are getting it, the ‘opposition’ of those who are waiting for it. That is the whole philosophy of their system of government.” The people in that system, he wrote, were imbued with “the curious belief that the state is the actual source of wealth.”[23]

         At any age Webster was too much the realist to swallow the socialist cream pie. In 1913, he published a satirical piece in The Atlantic Monthly called “Real Socialism.” He set the story in a private club in which each character has an allegorical name. The outsider in the group, whom he calls the Pest, interrupts when the talk turns to socialism.

         “In the course of my travels through the Tropics,” he says, “I visited a Socialist state.”

         They don’t believe it. Not in 1913.

         But I did, the Pest says.

         The Real Socialist is indignant. If the Pest can back up that statement, he says, “I’ll cheerfully pay for the drinks.”

         “You yourself shall be the judge,” says the Pest, who confidently cracks open a half-liter. “To begin with,” he says, “the state owns all the land.” It is the only employer. There are 30,000 inhabitants, and it feeds and houses all of them. “The state provides everything necessary for domestic purposes, down to knives and forks, pillow-cases and dish-towels; the quantity and quality of these, like the houses themselves, being graded according to the value of the service which the citizen performs.” The state provides doctors and medicines, including a scientific program of insect control.

         This state, says the Pest, is run by a dictator appointed by the president of the United States.

         “You can have no doubt,” says the Pest, “that the place I have been talking about is the Panama Canal Zone.” (The canal was then under construction.)

         The Real Socialist sputters. The Canal Zone cannot be socialist. “It has no foundation whatever in Democracy.”

         “Precisely,” replies the Pest. “That’s what is so wonderfully fitting about it. Because there’s nothing democratic about Socialism.” Listen to any socialist speaker, he says, and you will be convinced of one thing: that the utopia they crave will be run “by an oligarchy of highly intelligent persons, like the speaker, while the ‘mere unthinking voter’ ramps around and amuses himself with the illusion that it is all his own doing.”

         The story concludes, “We made the Socialist pay for the drinks. Well, it’s lucky these Socialists are all so rich.”[24]

         Webster began his career with a solid education. It was noted when he died that he was schooled in classical literature, had learned French and Italian and was “a belligerent classicist in music.” He had spent the year after his graduation in 1897 as a college instructor in rhetoric.

         But making it on his own, he hit a dry spell in which he said, “I had almost lost my grip.” In desperation, he took an old plot, hired a stenographer, and gushed 60,000 words in three weeks. The story brought him $600 — and would have been $900, he said, had he put his name to it. Thus began a routine that lasted for decades. Webster would begin at 9:00 a.m. and dictate 1,000 to 2,000 words. From what he called “the work of my left hand” — short stories, mainly, published under pseudonyms — he earned $5,000 a year.[25] In gold dollars, that was the equivalent of about $75,000 today, and in living standards relative to his contemporaries, more than that.

         Years later, in describing the plight of a failed novelist, Webster wrote, “True Art had never got adequately paid for since the capitalist system had been established.”[26] He is only partly serious about this. Webster saw to it that he got paid — so much so that the New York Timeschuckled editorially when, at age 47, he was to receive his inheritance. T.K. had bequeathed him a double share because young Harry had chosen such an unpromising career. (What the Timesdidn’t know was that the old man had died insolvent, ruined by his final venture.)[27]

         Webster’s “fiction factory” left him with several months a year to dictate novels under his own name. In all, he managed to pull more than two dozen out of his head, several of which concerned the social changes going on around him in upper-class Chicago.

         The Real Adventure (1916) is a story of a lawyer’s wife who joins her husband to learn the law. She gets no respect from him, and leaves to join a chorus line. Her “real adventure” leads not to disaster, but to a successful career as a costume designer. The Real Adventure was the No. 6 U.S. fiction bestseller for 1916. It was made into a silent movie in 1922 by King Vidor, who directed more than 50 films between 1913 and 1959, including Ayn Rand’s screenplay of The Fountainhead in 1949. Sad to say, the film version of The Real Adventureis lost.[28]

         An American Family (1918) is about a Chicago manufacturing clan similar to Webster’s own. Third-generation son Hugh Corbett is a believer in company-provided social work — a cause then promoted by such Chicago concerns as International Harvester. Hugh sets up a welfare department with nurses to visit the homes of the sick. The workers label them snoops, and are soon goaded into a strike. Hugh then tries to step in as an impartial umpire.

         Hugh’s elder brother Gregory, who’s running the company, has a better understanding of business. “I’m not pretending to be the umpire,” he says. “I’m after the best trade I can make. Because I happen to know… that the best I can get won’t be any too good… If one bunch out there are in a position to force me to pay them more than they’re worth, I’ve got to make some other bunch take less. As a matter of fact, what they’re worth is…what they can make me pay for what I have to have.”

         The strike has been fomented by anarcho-syndicalists. Hugh tries to sell them on the idea that the social work be done by their “one big union.” Forget taking over the company — its profit is only $1.60 per worker per week — and take over the playfields and medical plan instead. But these are left anarchists and they want to take over the whole company. In the end, they are muscled aside by the more down-to-earth craft unionists, who cut a deal with Gregory and go back to work. The impractical dreamers on both sides lose out. (And that’s what really happened then, as the left-anarchist Wobblies, or Industrial Workers of the World, were muscled aside by company unions and the forerunners of today’s AFL-CIO).

         Hugh gives up his vision of corporate paternalism and goes off to be a metallurgist. During World War I he invents a low-friction alloy that will revolutionize airplane engines. Gregory insists it’s not viable. This time Hugh does not give up: he will develop the alloy on his own.

         It is a difficult choice. Hugh is, implicitly, “a Protestant of an extreme type…standing before his God with no intermediary whatever.”[29] He has to think things through himself — and he does it correctly.

         An American Family has the skeleton of a first-rate business novel, and has more ideas in it than any of any of Webster’s business romances. But as the title suggests, it is more the story of a family.

       Webster portrayed a different type of businessman in Joseph Greer and His Daughter (1922). Joe Greer has made a grubstake in the South American jungles, returned to Chicago and set himself up as an industrial engineer. He invents a labor-saving process for making flax into linen, and asks the bankers to back it. They do, but they view the blunt-talking, black-bearded Greer with “instinctive distrust, like that of the domestic animal for the wild beast.”