{"id":471,"date":"2018-08-07T21:27:18","date_gmt":"2018-08-08T04:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=471"},"modified":"2024-06-02T19:11:30","modified_gmt":"2024-06-03T02:11:30","slug":"merwin-webster-1999","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/merwin-webster-1999\/","title":{"rendered":"Merwin-Webster (1999)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Henry Kitchell Webster \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Samuel Merwin<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>I became interested in Merwin and Webster because I was interested in novelist Ayn Rand. She disdained highbrow fiction. Her favorite novel, she said, was an early 20th<\/sup>century bestseller called Calumet \u201cK,\u201d whose authors\u00a0were listed as \u201cMerwin-Webster.<\/span><\/i>\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>One day I was poking around in Shorey’s, a Seattle secondhand bookstore that bought just about anyone’s books, paying pennies, and had a junk-pile of a collection. I ran across a 1919 novel called The Passionate Pilgrim by Samuel Merwin. I looked inside, and he was the Merwin of Merwin-Webster. I undertook to find out<\/span><\/i><\/i>\u00a0who Merwin was, and who Webster was, and to see what else they had written, particularly if they had written any more business novels like Calumet\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/i>\u201cK.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>Doing this r<\/span>equired tracking down and reading a bunch of old novels \u2014 but I did it, and wrote the following piece for the libertarian magazine Liberty, April 1999. I called it, \u201c \u2018As Surely as in a Steel Mill\u2019 : The Men Who Wrote Calumet \u2018K\u2019.<\/span>\u201d<\/span><\/p>

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 1945 Ayn Rand called\u00a0Calumet \u201cK\u201d<\/em> \u201cmy favorite thing in all world literature.\u201d Rand\u2019s novels idealized builders and industrial leaders, and rekindled support for an open, freewheeling American capitalism. In praising\u00a0Calumet \u201cK,\u201d<\/em> 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, \u201cI\u2019m sure it will appeal to all the readers of The Fountainhead<\/em>. It\u2019s that kind of thing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The judgment was characteristic of Rand, who responded to heroism and a \u201csense of life.\u201d In music, her favorites were light band numbers \u2014 \u201ctiddlywink music,\u201d she called them.\u00a0<\/span>Calumet \u201cK\u201d\u00a0<\/i>is tiddlywink music to the spirit of American industry.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The book was given to Rand, then a young immigrant from Soviet Russia, by Cecil B. DeMille.<\/span>[2]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>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 \u201ccan\u2019t blame us\u201d if the schedule slips, Bannon replies, \u201cWhen I have to begin explaining to MacBride why it can\u2019t be done, I\u2019ll 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\u2019re going to do it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As Rand says, Bannon is an\u00a0efficacious\u00a0<\/i>man. He might be a superintendent at one of Howard Roark\u2019s building sites. But he is not a Roark; he is not a radical arrayed against the ideas of the day. He embodies them \u2014 at least, some of them.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Calumet\u00a0<\/i>K\u201d\u00a0<\/i>was published in 1901, in the late summer of\u00a0laissez-faire<\/i>. The book, wrote Rand, \u201ccaptures the atmosphere \u2014 the sense of life \u2014 of a free country \u2014 what it was like, what it demanded of men\u2026\u201d<\/span>[3]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>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\u2019s\u00a0The Jungle\u00a0<\/i>(1906), a socialist\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u00a0The Fountainhead.<\/i><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Calumet \u201cK\u201d\u00a0<\/i>was noted by English playwright and novelist Arnold Bennett. In an essay in the\u00a0North American Review<\/i>, Bennett named it as the \u201cprototypical specimen\u201d of the new romantic American novel.<\/span>[4]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Cultural historian Vernon Parrington condemned it. Though Bannon \u201chas no time nor inclination to think [and] possesses no philosophy,\u201d Parrington wrote,\u00a0Calumet \u201cK\u201d\u00a0<\/i>and its predecessor,\u00a0The Short-Line War\u00a0<\/i>(1899) \u201cpresent the ideal of a competitive bourgeoisie\u201d to prevail over others. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning\u00a0Main Currents in American Thought\u00a0<\/i>(1927) Parrington wrote, \u201cNo more heartless, brutal, anarchistic books could be conceived \u2014 a mad philosophy for a mad world.\u201d<\/span>[5]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>It\u2019s the same hostility Rand would spark years later.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Rand rescued\u00a0Calumet \u201cK\u201d\u00a0<\/i>from oblivion and wrote a glowing introduction to it. But she said nothing of Merwin\u2019s and Webster\u2019s other books. She said almost nothing of the two men \u2014 not even their first names \u2014 and nothing of their ideas.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There are no ideas discussed in\u00a0Calumet \u201cK.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>But ideas aplenty are scattered through books Merwin and Webster wrote later. Their literary method grew less like Rand\u2019s, but some of their ideas \u2014 Webster\u2019s, if not Merwin\u2019s \u2014\u00a0\u00a0are much like hers.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Samuel 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\u2019s hometown of Utica, N.Y. They married college roommates, and stayed lifelong friends.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Their start as writers was influenced by Webster\u2019s 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 \u2014 and T.K. nearly did. T.K. was more of a businessman than Twain, but his son wrote, \u201cHe never made a conservative investment in his life.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 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 \u201cBull Moose\u201d ticket in 1912. In a speech to the City Club of Chicago, his son recalled, T.K. argued that \u201cno industry could be self-respecting that didn\u2019t pay better than a bare living wage.\u201d In the 1890s he insured his workers for industrial accidents, breaking ranks with his fellow manufacturers. T.K.\u2019s attitude toward unions is evident in\u00a0Calumet \u201cK.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0T.K. accepted that his son would be a writer. \u201cHe never asked me to report progress, never gave me unsolicited advice, never offered me any small errands or chores to do for him \u2018if I hadn\u2019t anything else to do,\u2019 \u201d Webster wrote.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Collaboration was common among beginning authors. To compose their first book,\u00a0The Short-Line War<\/i>, one account goes, \u201cthe two young men shut themselves into a room, and Webster, smoking a corncob, would formulate sentences in his mind.\u201d<\/span>[6]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>On this and later collaborations their names appeared as \u201cMerwin-Webster.\u201d Many a reader would assume that it was one author.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As 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. \u201cFather had been paying Sam an allowance to enable him to go on working on the book, and his telegram he offered to pay Sam\u2019s expenses to New York,\u201d Webster wrote. \u201cThis\u2026was Sam\u2019s escape from Evanston.\u201d<\/span>[7 ]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Webster, for all his world travels, would always live in Evanston, and in 1930 was still in the house built by his grandfather.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Short Line War\u00a0<\/i>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.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But the story connected with the American public. Merwin and Webster, said a contemporary blurb, had \u201cdiscovered in the exciting movements of trade and finance a field of fiction hitherto overlooked by American writers, but containing a great wealth of romance.\u201d<\/span>[8]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Scott Dalrymple, the author of a recent Ph.D. thesis of the turn-of-the-century business novel, wrote that Merwin and Webster \u201cmay be said to have invented the genre\u201d of the business romance.<\/span>[9]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Vernon Parrington wrote that Merwin and Webster\u2019s \u201cpopular success was immediate and maintained surprisingly.\u201d\u00a0The Short-Line War\u00a0<\/i>was in print until 1909.<\/span>[10]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Calumet \u201cK,\u201d\u00a0<\/i>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\u2019s hands, Dalrymple writes, the silo became \u201ca metaphor for human achievement\u2026as much a parable about the value of hard work and tenacity as anything from the pen of Benjamin Franklin.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Calumet \u201cK\u201d\u00a0<\/i>appeared in\u00a0The Saturday Evening Post\u00a0<\/i>from May 25 to August 17, 1901. It boosted the magazine\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Merwin and Webster separately wrote other business romances. Webster\u2019s\u00a0The Banker and the Bear\u00a0<\/i>(1900),\u00a0Roger Drake: Captain of Industry\u00a0<\/i>(1902) and\u00a0A King in Khaki\u00a0<\/i>(1909) hold up better than Merwin\u2019s\u00a0The Whip Hand\u00a0<\/i>(1903) and\u00a0The Road Builders\u00a0<\/i>(1906). Webster\u2019s stories have more substance. They also have an impish humor. In\u00a0The Banker and the Bear,\u00a0<\/i>a young woman is named Dick, because her older brothers are Tom and Harry. The struggle between \u201cThe Banker\u201d and \u201cThe Bear\u201d is over the price of a most inglorious commodity, lard \u2014 i.e., pig fat. When the agents of \u201cThe Bear\u201d move on the commodity pit, Webster writes, \u201cThey sold actual lard, wholly imaginary lard, grotesque prophecies of lard\u2026\u2019\u2019<\/span>[11]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0By today\u2019s standards, Webster is less politically correct about the common man. In\u00a0Calumet \u201cK,\u201d\u00a0<\/i>Bannon is proud of his men\u2019s work, but the way they gulp down the slogans of the union delegate shows him that \u201cmost of \u2019em have gunpowder in place of brains.\u201d<\/span>[12]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>That\u2019s Webster talking. Two decades later, in\u00a0Joseph Greer and his Daughter,\u00a0<\/i>Joe Greer says the same thing about the North Dakota farmers, who gulp down the slogans of socialist A.C. Townley\u2019s Non-Partisan League. The farmers \u201caren\u2019t willing to think,\u201d says Greer. \u201cAll they\u2019re willing to do is make trouble for the men who\u00a0do\u00a0<\/i>think.\u201d<\/span>[13]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Greer later observes that his chauffeur has plenty of free time to improve himself, and that \u201cif he isn\u2019t any good, he has a handsome chance to go to the devil.\u201d He adds, \u201cBut that\u2019s no concern of mine.\u201d (The chauffeur later becomes an airmail pilot and marries Greer\u2019s daughter.)<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A woman reminds Greer of the man in the Bible who said he wasn\u2019t his brother\u2019s keeper. \u201cThat was Cain,\u201d he replies. But Cain, he says, wasn\u2019t being criticized for a lack of solicitousness. \u201cHe\u2019d just murdered his brother and was trying to establish an alibi.\u201d<\/span>[14]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Merwin 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\u2019t. In\u00a0A King in Khaki,\u00a0<\/i>Smith, the manager of a private Caribbean island, fights a director\u2019s scheme to trick the company\u2019s small investors \u2014 \u201cpreachers and schoolteachers\u201d \u2014 through insider trading. Smith fights for the investors not because they are small, but because, he tells the director, \u201cthey are the real owners of this island, just as you are the owner of your watch.\u201d<\/span>[15]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Webster\u2019s businessmen do think about the morality of their actions. In\u00a0Roger Drake<\/i>, an industrialist\u2019s memoirs of building a copper and railroad empire out west, the industrialist pauses to consider a bribe he\u2019s just paid. \u201cI had never trafficked in men\u2019s consciences,\u201d he says. \u201cThis is not pretending, mind you, that I did not sometimes buy what ought never to be for sale\u2026But I never paid money for what wasn\u2019t in the market, for anything which, if not mine at my price, wasn\u2019t some other man\u2019s at his.\u201d<\/span>[16]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The bad guys in these stories use tactics forbidden today, such as fomenting a bank run\u00a0(The Banker and the Bear),\u00a0<\/i>discriminatory freight rebating\u00a0(Roger Drake),\u00a0<\/i>predatory price cutting\u00a0(The Whip Hand)<\/i>, and refusal to deal\u00a0(Calumet \u201cK\u201d)<\/i>. Some of these tactics were forbidden then, too, but a business response was usually quicker and more effective than filing a lawsuit. In\u00a0The Whip Hand,\u00a0<\/i>a lumber man undercut by below-cost selling retaliates by secretly buying his competitor\u2019s goods. In\u00a0The Banker and the Bear,\u00a0<\/i>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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Webster is particularly accepting of all that comes with\u00a0laissez-faire<\/i>. After Roger Drake vanquishes his opponent, he buys up all the local mines and forms a modern, efficient copper trust. And after \u201cthe banker\u201d beats \u201cthe bear,\u201d the story ends happily as the banker\u2019s client corners the market in pig fat.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 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.<\/span>[17]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Merwin believed in the lifting of social repression. To him, the United States was \u201cthe most conservative country in the world, with the possible exception of China.\u201d He was the nephew of a prominent suffragette, Frances Willard, and contributed to a book that promoted the vote for women.<\/span>[18]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>In 1922 he publicly opposed an effort to censor books.<\/span>[19]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Merwin admired entrepreneurs but was against\u00a0laissez-faire.\u00a0<\/i>He presented his politics with a blast in his political novel,\u00a0The Citadel\u00a0<\/i>(1912), written at the peak of the Progressives\u2019 crusade for the direct election of senators, the initiative and recall, municipal ownership and the federal income tax. The book\u2019s 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 \u2014 a proposal straight out of Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s National Progressive Party platform of 1912.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Garwood is a hero. Merwin has given him the same can-do spirit as Charlie Bannon, but instead of a grain elevator he\u2019s building, it\u2019s government. \u201cThe purpose of all vital government,\u201d Garwood declares, \u201cis to sit above and wield the greatest power in the land, whatever form that power may happen to take.\u201d All that matters is that government be \u201cexpressive of nothing on earth but the will of the people at the moment.\u201d<\/span>[20]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Garwood loses his seat. He loses, too, his fiancee, the delicate and fluff-headed daughter of a \u201cstandpat\u201d industrialist. But he gains a wife, a modern-thinking biologist named Margaret, and sets off with her to campaign for the Progressive state.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Reviewing this in\u00a0The Smart Set,\u00a0<\/i>H.L. Mencken was surprisingly polite. His complaint was that\u00a0The Citadel\u00a0<\/i>doesn\u2019t explain\u00a0why\u00a0<\/i>Garwood has his conversion. \u201cProgressivism, in brief, is depicted as a disease of sudden and devastating onset,\u201d Mencken wrote. \u201cWe see a representative of a safe and rotten borough suddenly run amuck, and are left wondering wherefore and why.\u201d Mencken summed up: \u201cNot a story of much depth and beam, to be sure, but still a pleasant one, and not as pontifical as it might have been.\u201d<\/span>[21]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A dozen years later Merwin allowed he\u2019d been \u201ca bit naive,\u201d but said, \u201cI\u2019m glad I once fought for something.\u201d<\/span>[22]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Webster was not a joiner of causes, and less inclined to believe in the goodness of government. After traveling in Central America, he wrote, \u201cTheir \u2018administration\u2019 consists of those who are getting it, the \u2018opposition\u2019 of those who are waiting for it. That is the whole philosophy of their system of government.\u201d The people in that system, he wrote, were imbued with \u201cthe curious belief that the state is the actual source of wealth.\u201d<\/span>[23]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At any age Webster was too much the realist to swallow the socialist cream pie. In 1913,\u00a0<\/i>he published a satirical piece in\u00a0The Atlantic Monthly\u00a0<\/i>called \u201cReal Socialism.\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cIn the course of my travels through the Tropics,\u201d he says, \u201cI visited a Socialist state.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0They don\u2019t believe it. Not in 1913.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But I did, the Pest says.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Real Socialist is indignant. If the Pest can back up that statement, he says, \u201cI\u2019ll cheerfully pay for the drinks.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cYou yourself shall be the judge,\u201d says the Pest, who confidently cracks open a half-liter. \u201cTo begin with,\u201d he says, \u201cthe state owns all the land.\u201d It is the only employer. There are 30,000 inhabitants, and it feeds and houses all of them. \u201cThe 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.\u201d The state provides doctors and medicines, including a scientific program of insect control.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0This state, says the Pest, is run by a dictator appointed by the president of the United States.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cYou can have no doubt,\u201d says the Pest, \u201cthat the place I have been talking about is the Panama Canal Zone.\u201d (The canal was then under construction.)<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Real Socialist sputters. The Canal Zone cannot be socialist. \u201cIt has no foundation whatever in Democracy.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cPrecisely,\u201d replies the Pest. \u201cThat\u2019s what is so wonderfully fitting about it. Because there\u2019s nothing democratic about Socialism.\u201d Listen to any socialist speaker, he says, and you will be convinced of one thing: that the utopia they crave will be run \u201cby an oligarchy of highly intelligent persons, like the speaker, while the \u2018mere unthinking voter\u2019 ramps around and amuses himself with the illusion that it is all his own doing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The story concludes, \u201cWe made the Socialist pay for the drinks. Well, it\u2019s lucky these Socialists are all so rich.\u201d<\/span>[24]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Webster 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 \u201ca belligerent classicist in music.\u201d He had spent the year after his graduation in 1897 as a college instructor in rhetoric.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But making it on his own, he hit a dry spell in which he said, \u201cI had almost lost my grip.\u201d In desperation, he took an old plot, hired a stenographer, and gushed 60,000 words in three weeks. The story brought him $600 \u2014 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 \u201cthe work of my left hand\u201d \u2014 short stories, mainly, published under pseudonyms \u2014 he earned $5,000 a year.<\/span>[25]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>In gold dollars, that was the equivalent of about $75,000 today, and in living standards relative to his contemporaries, more than that.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Years later, in describing the plight of a failed novelist, Webster wrote, \u201cTrue Art had never got adequately paid for since the capitalist system had been established.\u201d<\/span>[26]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>He is only partly serious about this. Webster saw to it that he got paid \u2014 so much so that the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>chuckled 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\u00a0Times<\/i>didn\u2019t know was that the old man had died insolvent, ruined by his final venture.)<\/span>[27]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Webster\u2019s \u201cfiction factory\u201d 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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Real Adventure\u00a0<\/i>(1916) is a story of a lawyer\u2019s wife who joins her husband to learn the law. She gets no respect from him, and leaves to join a chorus line. Her \u201creal adventure\u201d leads not to disaster, but to a successful career as a costume designer.\u00a0The Real Adventure\u00a0<\/i>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\u2019s screenplay of The Fountainhead<\/i> in 1949. Sad to say, the film version of\u00a0The Real Adventure<\/i>is lost.<\/span>[28]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0An American Family\u00a0<\/i>(1918) is about a Chicago manufacturing clan similar to Webster\u2019s own. Third-generation son Hugh Corbett is a believer in company-provided social work \u2014 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.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Hugh\u2019s elder brother Gregory, who\u2019s running the company, has a better understanding of business. \u201cI\u2019m not pretending to be the umpire,\u201d he says. \u201cI\u2019m after the best trade I can make. Because I happen to know\u2026 that the best I can get won\u2019t be any too good\u2026 If one bunch out there are in a position to force me to pay them more than they\u2019re worth, I\u2019ve got to make some other bunch take less. As a matter of fact, what they\u2019re worth is\u2026what they can make me pay for what I have to have.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The strike has been fomented by anarcho-syndicalists. Hugh tries to sell them on the idea that the social work be done by their \u201cone big union.\u201d Forget taking over the company \u2014 its profit is only $1.60 per worker per week \u2014 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\u2019s 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\u2019s AFL-CIO).<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Hugh 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\u2019s not viable. This time Hugh does not give up: he will develop the alloy on his own.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It is a difficult choice. Hugh is, implicitly, \u201ca Protestant of an extreme type\u2026standing before his God with no intermediary whatever.\u201d<\/span>[29]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>He has to think things through himself \u2014 and he does it correctly.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0An American Family\u00a0<\/i>has the skeleton of a first-rate business novel, and has more ideas in it than any of any of Webster\u2019s business romances. But as the title suggests, it is more the story of a family.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/b>Webster portrayed a different type of businessman in\u00a0Joseph Greer and His Daughter\u00a0<\/i>(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 \u201cinstinctive distrust, like that of the domestic animal for the wild beast.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0To Greer, the financiers are \u201cstall-fed,\u201d living placidly off interest payments. \u201cMoney\u2019s nothing but a way of getting things done,\u201d he declares. \u201cWhat is it they\u2019re trying to get done? If I had Williamson\u2019s money, I\u2019d do something with it\u2026 What does Williamson want to run? The city? \u2026A railroad? A steamship line? An opera company? A harem? I don\u2019t care what. But it ought to be\u00a0<\/span>something<\/span>.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

[1]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Letter to Barbara Brandt, Dec. 11, 1945, in\u00a0Letters of Ayn Rand,<\/i>Michael Berliner, ed., Dutton, 1995, p. 252.<\/p><\/div>

[2]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Barbara Branden,\u00a0The Passion of Ayn Rand,<\/i>Doubleday, 1986, p. 102.<\/p><\/div>

[3]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Calumet \u201cK,\u201d<\/i>pp. 133, iii. The 1993 hardback edition (still available from Second Renaissance Books, 143 West Street, New Milford, CT 06776) has the Rand introduction from the 1967 NBI Press edition and the identical text and illustrations of the Macmillan edition of 1901.<\/p><\/div>

[4]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\u201cThe Future of the American Novel, \u201d published Jan. 1912 but written in 1903.<\/p><\/div>

[5]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>SubtitledAn Interpretation of American Literature from the Beginning to 1920,<\/i>Harcourt, Brace & Co., Vol. 3, p. 186.<\/p><\/div>

[6]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycraft,\u00a0Twentieth Century Authors: A Biographical Dictionary of Modern Literature<\/i>, New York, H.W. Wilson, 1942, pp. 950 and 1486-1487.<\/p><\/div>

[7]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Henry Kitchell Webster,\u00a0A Memoir of Towner Keeney Webster 1849-1922<\/i>, Walter A. Strong, 1930, pp. 56, 58, 70, 75, 103.<\/p><\/div>

[8]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>A blurb for\u00a0Calumet \u201cK\u201d\u00a0<\/i>in the 1904 edition of\u00a0Roger Drake<\/i>.<\/p><\/div>

[9]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>\u201cCapital Fictions: The Business Novel in America, 1880-1910,\u201d Ph.D. thesis in American Literature, Victor Doyno, advisor, State University of New York at Buffalo, Jan. 1997, pp. 97-98. Dalrymple, who works in marketing at Koch Industries, Wichita, quips that he may have \u201cthe world\u2019s most extensive Merwin and Webster collection.\u201d [Dalrymple pursued a career as a business-school professor and in 2014 was named president of Columbia College in Columbia, Mo.]<\/p><\/div>

[10]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Main Currents in American Thought,<\/i>Vol. 3, p. 186.<\/p><\/div>

[11]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Webster,The Banker and the Bear,<\/i>Macmillan, 1900, p. 231.<\/p><\/div>

[12]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Calumet \u201cK,\u201d<\/i>p. 199. Cited by Dalrymple, p. 83.<\/p><\/div>

[13]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Webster,Joseph Greer and His Daughter,<\/i>A.L. Burt, 1922, p. 74.<\/p><\/div>

[14]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Joseph Greer and His Daughter,<\/i>p. 99.<\/p><\/div>

[15]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Webster,A King in Khaki,<\/i>D. Appleton & Co., 1909, p. 107.<\/p><\/div>

[16]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Webster,Roger Drake, Captain of Industry,\u00a0<\/i>Macmillan, 1902, pp. 207-208.<\/p><\/div>

[17]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), a Briton, was a champion of sex education and women\u2019s rights. He was the author of the seven-volume\u00a0Studies in the Psychology of Sex<\/i>(1897-1928) of which H.L. Mencken approvingly wrote, \u201chad the astounding effect of breaking down one of the most rigid taboos known to man.\u201d The books were initially restricted to physicians. Ellen Key (1849-1926), a Swede, was the author of\u00a0The Century of the Child<\/i>(1900), an influential book that argued against corporal punishment. \u201cTo suppress the real personality of the child and to supplant it with another personality continues to be a pedagogical crime,\u201d she wrote.<\/p><\/div>

[18]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>From his obituary,\u00a0New York Times<\/i>, Oct. 18, 1936.<\/p><\/div>

[19]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>New York Times<\/i>, Aug. 6, 1922.<\/p><\/div>

[20]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Samuel Merwin,\u00a0The Citadel<\/i>, Century, 1912, p. 191.<\/p><\/div>

[21]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>The Smart Set<\/i>, Sept. 1912, p 154. Vincent Fitzpatrick of Baltimore\u2019s Enoch Pratt Free Library found this and an earlier comment in\u00a0The Smart Set<\/i>on Webster\u2019s\u00a0The Sky Man<\/i>. Those are apparently the only examples of Mencken commentary on either Merwin or Webster.<\/p><\/div>

[22]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Merwin, \u201cHitting Bottom,\u201d\u00a0Collier\u2019s,<\/i>Dec. 13, 1924.<\/p><\/div>

[23]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Everybody\u2019s<\/i>, March 1910.<\/p><\/div>

[24]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Webster, \u201cReal Socialism,\u201d\u00a0Atlantic Monthly<\/i>, May 1913, pp. 634-639.<\/p><\/div>

[25]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>From his obituary,\u00a0New York Times<\/i>, Dec. 10, 1932. The description of his way of writing was taken from an anonymous article in the\u00a0Saturday Evening Post,\u00a0<\/i>\u201cMaking a Living by Literature.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

[26]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Webster,An American Family<\/i>, Bobbs Merrill, 1918, p. 262.<\/p><\/div>

[27]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>New York Times,<\/i>Oct. 22, 1922, sec. 2, p. 6;\u00a0A Memoir of Towner Keeney Webster,<\/i>p. 105.<\/p><\/div>

[28]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Raymond Durgnat and Scott Simmon,\u00a0King Vidor, American<\/i>, University of California Press, 1988, p. 339. The movie starred King\u2019s wife, Florence, and Clyde Fillmore.<\/p><\/div>

[29]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>An American Family<\/i>, pp. 214, 440.<\/p><\/div>

\u00a0<\/p><\/div>

\u00a0<\/div><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Similarly, Greer can\u2019t fathom the attitude of his hired scientist, who sees only an intellectual problem. \u201cThey\u2019re queer birds, these pure scientists,\u201d Greer says. \u201cThey don\u2019t care what anything\u2019s\u00a0<\/span>for<\/span>any more than the bankers care how it works. It isn\u2019t till a man like me comes along\u2026and cracks their heads together that anything really happens in the world.\u201d<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Here, plainly stated, is the credo of the entrepreneur. But after Webster creates this \u201ctough-sinewed\u2026barbaric, and genially predacious\u201d<\/span>[30]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>character, he mires him in conversation and flirtation for 300 pages. Greer\u2019s attempt to manage his 19-year-old daughter is quite convincing \u2014 he fails \u2014 but only in the last 75 pages does his business regain center stage.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0His financiers sell him out, and he goes off to work on a new kind of road pavement.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Isabel Paterson, who would become a confidante of Rand in the 1940s, and publish the libertarian classic\u00a0The God of the Machine\u00a0<\/span>in 1943, was beginning her career as a novelist and book critic in 1922. In her review of\u00a0Joseph Greer and His Daughter\u00a0<\/span>for the\u00a0New York Tribune,\u00a0<\/span>she wrote that story sets up Greer as a \u201ctype\u201d and then fails to make a convincing statement about that type. \u201cToo often it slides off into being just a good story,\u201d she wrote.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And it is a\u00a0long\u00a0<\/span>story \u2014 489 pages. Webster \u201cis said to dictate his novels,\u201d Paterson wrote, \u201cand no doubt it sounds all right, but it doesn\u2019t read right. This novel can be read, but if it were half as long it could be read twice as easily.\u201d<\/span>[31]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>At 452 pages, the same could be said of\u00a0An American Family.<\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In his final decade, Webster produced mostly light fiction. He died of cancer at age 57, in 1932, a few weeks after the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Merwin went to Chicago to be a pallbearer.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/i>gave Webster a one-column obituary with photo, as it would Merwin in 1936. It said, \u201cMr. Webster\u2019s novels attracted attention about 15 years ago, when they were described\u2026as precise and accurate interpretations of existence in Chicago at that time.\u201d By 1942,\u00a0Twentieth Century Authors\u00a0<\/i>opined that\u00a0An American Family\u00a0<\/i>was \u201cperhaps the only one of these productions that has any chance of survival.\u201d No such luck. By 1983,\u00a0The Oxford Companion to American Literature<\/i>identified Webster as best known for the Merwin-Webster \u201cromantic glorifications of captains of industry.\u201d<\/span>[32]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In all likelihood, this reference is lifted straight from Vernon Parrington, who uses the term \u201ccaptain of industry\u201d in his denunciation of\u00a0The Short-Line War\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0Calumet \u201cK.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>It is a sloppy characterization: the Merwin-Webster heroes are not Rockefellers. Bannon is a construction superintendent.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0However, the Merwin-Webster characters\u00a0are\u00a0<\/i>heroes. Webster\u2019s own characters are less heroic. He saw his job as a storyteller, not the presentation of an ideal. The essence of a novel, he wrote, was neither psychoanalysis, sociology nor philosophy, but \u201cpurposeful motion.\u201d A story should have movement and suspense. His example of \u201cone of the finest stories ever written\u201d (not that he always lived up to it) is Robert Louis Stevenson\u2019s\u00a0Treasure Island.<\/i><\/span>[33]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 1915, Merwin was asked by the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/i>to list the best novels in English. \u201cA romance is not a novel,\u201d he replied. \u201cA story in which the characters are secondary to the plot interest cannot possibly be a novel.\u201d<\/span>[34]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The portrayal of character, Merwin believed, should be based on experience. He said, \u201cThe only thing a man has to write about is himself.\u201d Strong writing required strong experiences. \u201cWriters need reactions, shocks, a sort of spiritual absinthe. In order to produce books worth reading, they must be excited, alert, on the third gear.\u201d<\/span>[35]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Merwin had a more difficult start than Webster. \u201cEven when we were playing together in Evanston, outwardly thinking the same things, our inner developments were tremendously different,\u201d he wrote Webster in 1915. Merwin recalled hiding behind a door and sobbing when a constable came to seize the family furniture. \u201cI was always desperately fighting away from and covering up (instinctively, I suppose) a painful variety of genteel poverty\u2026 I could never write of prosperous, comfortable people with the solidity, the convincing sense of belonging, that you have conveyed in some of your recent work.\u201d He summed up: \u201cYou and I really have in us, I do believe, the germs of representing two real and vital aspects of American life. But very different aspects.\u201d<\/span>[36]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A shy boy with a taste for fine clothes, Merwin was drawn to writing. As a teenager, he covered lectures, businessmen\u2019s picnics and sports for the\u00a0Evanston\u00a0<\/i>Index<\/i>. He created comic operas, and had one produced at 23. But he was on the verge of taking a job with a harvester company when\u00a0The Youth\u2019s Companion\u00a0<\/i>paid him $35 for a short story.<\/span>[37]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0After he and Webster had made a success with\u00a0Calumet \u201cK,\u201d\u00a0<\/i>and traveled with their wives to France, Merwin, too, hit a dry spell \u2014 and a longer one than Webster\u2019s. \u201cBefore I was 30,\u201d Merwin wrote, \u201call that fine fresh vigor of the earlier twenties was gone.\u201d<\/span>[38]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>He turned back to journalism, working for a New York magazine,\u00a0Success<\/i>. It sent him to China for six months \u2014 his cup of absinthe, judging from how often he used the Orient as a setting for stories.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0His aim was to expose the British government\u2019s trade in opium. A campaign had arisen in Britain to end that trade, and a year after his\u00a0Drugging a Nation\u00a0<\/i>(1908) was published in the United States, Britain did end it.<\/span>[39]\u00a0<\/span>Merwin\u2019s book shows the British government licensing and financing the poppy growers of India, processing the crop and auctioning it to \u201ca curious crowd of Parsees, Mohammedans, Hindoos and Asiatic Jews\u201d for sale in China.<\/span>[40]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Merwin\u2019s expos\u00e9 was part of a broader movement that would end in opiate prohibition. In 1906 the Pure Food and Drug Act had driven laudanum (opium) out of most patent medicines in the United States by requiring disclosure on the label; in 1914 the Harrison Narcotic Act required physicians to maintain records of all opiate transactions.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Merwin, meanwhile, had become publisher of\u00a0Success<\/i>, where he joined in the muckrakers\u2019 attack on business. It was a time, he recalled, when \u201cany sensitive capitalist had to dodge through back streets if he wished for momentary peace of mind.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Muckraking flourished \u201cuntil exactly 1910,\u201d he wrote, whereupon\u00a0Success\u00a0<\/i>began to fail. For 10 months Merwin struggled without pay. He had to move his family to $30-a-month basement apartment. He began feverishly writing\u00a0The Citadel,\u00a0<\/i>hoping to sell it to a<\/i>magazine, but it was too political. Then, one day, he collapsed in the Pennsylvania Station of nerves and overwork. In an account for\u00a0Collier\u2019s<\/i>, he wrote, \u201cThat day marks the end of Merwin the publisher.\u201d<\/span>[41]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Citadel\u00a0<\/i>was also the beginning of Merwin the mainstream novelist. Journalism had left its mark; Merwin had become a much closer observer of his fellow man. His writing had become more efficient than Webster\u2019s, but remained more earnest and middlebrow.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In his novel\u00a0The Honey Bee\u00a0<\/i>(1915) he tells the story of one of \u201cthe unsexed females that do the work.\u201d After a passion for a married entrepreneur, apparel buyer Hilda Wilson has immersed herself in work. Now 32 and alone in Paris, she discovers that \u201cshe could not forever go on suppressing those deep yearnings and stirrings that make life the tangle it is.\u201d<\/span>[42]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Hilda\u2019s situation is opposite of the frustrated wife Webster portrays in\u00a0The Real Adventure<\/i>. \u201cTwo men might have been writing the same story,\u201d said Merwin, \u201cone pro, and the other, con.\u201d<\/span>[43]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Merwin\u2019s story sounds anti-feminist, but is not. He is not against women going out in the world of men; he is against the unreasonable judgments society imposes on them.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In her introduction to\u00a0Calumet \u201cK,\u201d <\/i>Ayn\u00a0<\/i>Rand complained of the \u201ctimidly, evasively mid-Victorian\u201d romance between Bannon and his stenographer.<\/span>[44]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Hilda Wilson is a much more red-blooded character. But even when\u00a0The Honey Bee\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>heroine is reunited with her old lover, they still don\u2019t have sex \u2014 because they\u2019re not married. (There is no sex in any of these books; \u201cmake love\u201d refers to handholding and kissing, not coitus.)<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Later in the decade, Merwin wrote three novels about a character named Henry Calverly.\u00a0Twentieth Century Authors\u00a0<\/i>picked the first two books,\u00a0Temperamental Henry\u00a0<\/i>(1917) and\u00a0Henry is Twenty\u00a0<\/i>(1918), as Merwin\u2019s best, saying they \u201chad sound adolescent psychology, and evoked the period of the Illinois town of the \u2019nineties with skill and charm.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In\u00a0Henry is Twenty<\/i>, Henry is living in a boarding house, his parents both dead. Moody, and occasionally moonstruck, he seethes with the passions of a writer-to-be. A weaker lad would have \u201clong since given up, gone into Smith Brothers\u2019 wholesale, taken his spiritual beating and fallen into step with his generation.\u201d Instead, Henry struggles as a reporter for a weekly paper, paid by the column-inch while the owner, who \u201clived on the labor of others,\u201d flatters the town merchants.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In a burst of creation, Henry writes a brutally honest story of the characters at the annual businessmen\u2019s picnic. His employer suppresses it, but Henry sells it to a rival. It is a sensation. He pens 20 literary sketches of the town grandees. The second paper fails; Henry\u2019s manuscripts are about to be seized as assets. \u201cBut they\u2019re\u00a0mine!\u201d\u00a0<\/i>he wails.<\/span>[45]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>He arranges a buyout of the second paper, and gets his stories into print. Henry has \u201cno head for business\u201d \u2014 which Merwin also said about himself \u2014 but his writing is noted by a New York publisher, and his career takes off.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It later takes a tragic turn. In\u00a0The Passionate Pilgrim\u00a0<\/i>(1919), Henry is starting over as a reporter in a midwestern city. Sent to interview the mayor, an obsequious whore of business interests, Henry once again writes a brutally honest piece, and is fired.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0He then sets out to write the story of industrialist Jim Cantey, the original \u201cinterest\u201d himself. Cantey is one of the few honest men in the book. The\u00a0New York Times\u2019s<\/i>reviewer called him \u201cby all odds its most interesting character.\u201d<\/span>[46\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Unfortunately, he\u2019s dead, and speaks through a posthumous testament.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In this testament Cantey reflects on the era of laissez-faire: \u201cBusiness, as I\u2019ve found it, is lawless and cruel\u2026 It\u2019s no way to build a nation \u2014 to do that, you\u2019ve got to breed for sound citizenship, organize for it \u2014 but it\u2019s a cruel, beautiful game, all the same. Like war. And I guess this country can stand it for another fifty years or so. Until the land is settled thicker, and the limits of our natural resources come in sight. Then, I suppose it\u2019ll become some kind of socialist state, but for the present, while the going\u2019s good, no power on earth can stop it… Congress? That\u2019s only a place. And a place can\u2019t stop anything, or start anything. It\u2019s where the hired men of the great business forces meet and fight to neutralize one another\u2026 That\u2019s all I can see \u2014 forces, with strong men riding them, perhaps managing to steer them a little, more often dragged along by them.\u201d<\/span>[47]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0To blame \u201cforces\u201d rather than individuals is something no Webster protagonist would do. But Merwin had to reconcile his admiration for strong individuals with a belief in \u201csome kind of socialist state\u201d in which \u201cforces\u201d could be controlled.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Merwin\u2019s later fiction was less serious. His last book, however,\u00a0Rise and Fight Againe\u00a0<\/i>(1935), was something different \u2014 the business story of his childhood friend Louis Liggett, who founded the United Drug Co. and organized the Rexall drugstores.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Rexall was not a chain, but an alliance of independents that aimed to forestall a chain. Liggett, he writes, had \u201cconceived a New Deal for the small merchant.\u201d Merwin, the defender of the little guy, says America \u201cwould be a sounder, saner country\u201d with more such cooperative ventures.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Though he calls United Drug \u201cnever for a moment a private enterprise in the old sense,\u201d it\u00a0is\u00a0<\/i>private. It is a stock company, organized by one man, a salesman \u201cgiving value for value.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The Rexall story, Merwin admits, shows \u201cmuch of the drive to success and power that has made us as a people, for better or worse, what we are today.\u201d (Note the \u201cfor better or worse.\u201d) He goes on, \u201cIt may be that the extraordinary \u2018rugged individualism\u2019 of the past fifty years is over now. Sometimes it almost seems so. Maybe we are to be less concerned with building up great private enterprises and more with considering the cultural welfare of the nation as a whole. I don\u2019t know.\u2019\u2019<\/span>[48]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Merwin never did square his admiration of individuals with his support of the Progressive state. He died a year later, at 62, after suffering a stroke while eating dinner at his club overlooking Gramercy Park.<\/span>[49]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In matters of religion, neither Merwin nor Webster took the same position as Rand. She was a radical. If she was for an idea, she was for it all the way. To her, being for reason meant being an atheist.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In daily living, that meant she was for \u201cthis world\u201d and not some other. So are many people who are not atheists. The distinction is between having a mystical view of ultimate questions and a mystical rule of one\u2019s daily life. On this divide, Merwin and Webster are clearly \u201cof this world.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0T.K. Webster had been a devout Baptist. He converted to his wife\u2019s Presbyterianism because the Baptists would not admit her to communion without a dunking. Young Webster thus became a Presbyterian, too. \u201cMy personal relief at this move was enormous, as it removed for me the horror of contemplating my immersion,\u201d he writes. Of his father, he writes, \u201cFrom that time forward, his religion was in the daylight zone where he thought things out for himself.\u201d<\/span>[50]\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Webster was likely the same sort of \u201cextreme Protestant\u201d as his character Hugh Corbett, who also thought things out for himself.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Merwin wrote of his religion, \u201cI seem to have my own.\u201d As to what it consisted of, he wrote, \u201cI\u2019ll only say that I seem to find a thrill in being a two-legged speck in a universe where the stars move around right on time, and the maple tassels appear methodically every spring.\u201d<\/span>[51]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Years earlier, Merwin and Webster had attacked religious fundamentalism in their last and most ambitious collaboration,\u00a0Comrade John\u00a0<\/i>(1907). It was written mostly by Webster, who, they agreed, was to get most of the royalties for it.<\/span>[52]<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The novel is the story of a capitalist builder and a cult prophet. The prophet, when he meets his downfall, says:<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThere are only two true religions and they\u2019re both old. One of them has got a cross on it, and it tells you that the way to save your life is to give it away, to deny it. It isn\u2019t my religion, and I don\u2019t know much about it. It never was to my taste. But it\u2019s a true religion for such as care for its terms. And the other religion, my religion, tells you to get what pleasure you can out of what comes to you, and be content to die and rot when your time comes.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The hero has nothing to say of this bold doctrine. To him, the prophet is little more than a peddler of patent medicines.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The hero is John Chance, a builder of modern and fantastic amusement parks. After finishing one such park in Pittsburgh, Chance vacations in Paris. There, during a boisterous street carnival, he spots a stunning young American woman being borne along by the crowd. She is about to be chosen queen of the carnival. He knows (but she doesn\u2019t) will mean she will be debauched. He rescues her, but afterward she is not so sure she wants to be rescued. Paris is\u00a0so<\/i>much more thrilling than Ohio.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cI feel as if I must have gone through the looking glass,\u201d says the woman, Cynthia. \u201cSomeone was telling me about a place called that at the Pittsburgh fair last summer, and I thought it would have been fun to see it. But this is nicer; this is the real thing\u2026 I don\u2019t a bit want to go back to the other \u2014 the country where you always know just what to expect and have to take things called consequences.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Chance replies, \u201cIf this were a looking-glass country I\u2019d be inclined to let you stay in it, but it\u2019s not. Even that side-show faker at Pittsburgh was nearer it. A man could go there and ride in the scenic railway or shoot the chutes and get a thrill of danger and abandonment without the consequences. Somebody that he didn\u2019t know about was responsible for his safety; that was somebody\u2019s job\u2026 But here \u2014 people come here, people without jobs, who think this is a looking-glass country. It looks like it, but you get what\u2019s coming to you here just as surely as in a steel mill.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0They part ways, and Chance returns to America. He has been offered a job to build a cathedral at Beechcroft, a utopian community founded by Herman Stein. Stein, a character based on a turn-of-the-century messiah named Elbert Hubbard, preaches that commercial labor is wicked, and hand labor, divine. Chance is offered double the usual pay for the project, but only if he agrees that he and his crew, who are \u201cfrankly commercial\u201d builders, will dress up in tunics and pretend to be Stein\u2019s devotees.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Intrigued by the challenge of a cathedral rather than an amusement park, Chance accepts. He builds a splendid cathedral. He is about to tackle the accompanying buildings when who should appear but Cynthia. Once again he has a chance to lecture her about reality and one\u2019s dreams. It\u2019s not enough to have a dream, he says. \u201cIt\u2019s making the dream come true that counts\u2026It means turning your dreams into mathematics and your mathematics into hard, rough refractory materials.\u201d<\/span>[53]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In her introduction to\u00a0Calumet \u201cK,\u201d\u00a0<\/i>Rand says Charlie Bannon\u2019s \u201cdominant characteristic is a total commitment to the absolutism of reality.\u201d In\u00a0Calumet \u201cK,\u201d\u00a0<\/i>that was an implied message; in\u00a0Comrade John,\u00a0<\/i>it is explicit.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The book was the first by either Merwin or Webster made into a movie, though it\u2019s unlikely that a copy survives. Produced in 1915, \u201cComrade John\u201d presented Stein played by debonair Lew Cody, Chance by William Elliott and Cynthia by \u201cBaby Ruth\u201d Roland. All went on to careers in the silent films. It is unlikely this film presented a serious theme.\u00a0Variety\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>one-paragraph review summed it up as a \u201cfairly good popular-priced picture.\u201d<\/span>[54]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Even the book only partly succeeds. Despite Chance\u2019s lectures about reality, the story is not as tethered to the earth as\u00a0Calumet \u201cK.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>The focus sometimes blurs; Chance is memorable more for what he says than who he is. But what he says is far above any of Charlie Bannon\u2019s thoughts in\u00a0Calumet \u201cK.\u201d\u00a0<\/i>The ending of\u00a0Comrade John,\u00a0<\/i>in which the builder brings down his own creation to keep it from being used against the woman he loves, is reminiscent of the ending in\u00a0The Fountainhead<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Whether Rand read any of their books other than\u00a0Calumet \u201cK,\u201d\u00a0<\/i>\u2014 and we don\u2019t know \u2014 Merwin and Webster deserve credit as her forerunners. She made fireworks of the business romance; they were its principal inventors.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But they might have done much more with it than they did. They were competent novelists, and unlike her, were Americans from the heartland. They came of age at the opening of the century, in the era of Andrew Carnegie and James J. Hill.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Merwin knew what he could have done.\u00a0In The Passionate Pilgrim,\u00a0<\/i>Henry Calverly is expounding with enthusiasm to an old newspaperman. \u201cIf you and Jim Cantey and I could have sat down together, we might have composed an epic,\u201d he says. \u201cIf we were big enough. It\u2019s a job for a Dumas and a Balzac rolled into one \u2014 the big push westward\u2026 Men are building new railways up here, and pushing great fleets across the seas. Others are cornering the steel and and coal they\u2019ve got to use\u2026 The few big men that fight their way to the top\u2026 And the orchestra is steam-hammers and pneumatic riveters, and the hiss of steam and the screech of locomotives, and \u2014 and Pittsburgh! It\u2019s energy \u2014 it\u2019s life itself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And instead of writing about\u00a0that<\/i>, he says, novelists produce \u201cpretty little stories about why she married him, or why he married her \u2014 with this tremendous drama swirling around their very heads.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The old newspaperman speaks up. \u201cNow and then it does get into the books,\u201d he says. \u201cBut the crowd never read that kind.\u201d<\/span>[55]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But they do.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a9 1999 Bruce Ramsey<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Merwin-Webster<\/span><\/b><\/p>

The Short-Line War, 1899<\/span><\/p>

Calumet \u201cK\u201d, 1901<\/span><\/p>

Comrade John, 1907*<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Henry Kitchell Webster<\/span><\/b><\/p>

The Banker and the Bear, 1900<\/span><\/p>

Roger Drake: Captain of Industry, 1902<\/span><\/p>

The Duke of Cameron Avenue, 1904<\/span><\/p>

Traitor and Loyalist, 1904<\/span><\/p>

The Whispering Man, 1908<\/span><\/p>

A King in Khaki, 1909*<\/span><\/p>

The Sky-Man, 1910<\/span><\/p>

The Girl in the Other Seat, 1911<\/span><\/p>

The Ghost Girl, 1913<\/span><\/p>

The Butterfly, 1914*<\/span><\/p>

The Painted Scene, 1916*<\/span><\/p>

The Real Adventure, 1916*<\/span><\/p>

The Thoroughbred, 1917<\/span><\/p>

An American Family, 1918<\/span><\/p>

Mary Wollaston, 1920<\/span><\/p>

Real Life, 1921<\/span><\/p>

Joseph Greer and His Daughter, 1922*<\/span><\/p>

The Innocents, 1924<\/span><\/p>

The Corbin Necklace, 1926<\/span><\/p>

Philopena, 1927<\/span><\/p>

The Beginners, 1927<\/span><\/p>

The Clock Strikes Two, 1928<\/span><\/p>

The Quartz Eye, 1928<\/span><\/p>

The Sealed Trunk, 1929<\/span><\/p>

A Memoir of Towner Keeney Webster, 1930<\/span><\/p>

The Man With the Scarred Hand, 1930<\/span><\/p>

Who Is the Next, 1931<\/span><\/p>

The Alleged Great Aunt, 1935<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

Samuel Merwin<\/span><\/b><\/p>

The Road to Frontenac, 1901<\/span><\/p>

The Whip Hand, 1903<\/span><\/p>

His Little World, 1903<\/span><\/p>

The Merry Anne, 1904<\/span><\/p>

The Road Builders, 1906<\/span><\/p>

Drugging a Nation, 1908<\/span><\/p>

The Citadel, 1912<\/span><\/p>

Anthony the Absolute, 1914<\/span><\/p>

The Charmed Life of Miss Austin, 1914<\/span><\/p>

The Honey Bee, 1915<\/span><\/p>

The Trufflers, 1916<\/span><\/p>

Temperamental Henry, 1917<\/span><\/p>

Henry is Twenty, 1918<\/span><\/p>

The Passionate Pilgrim, 1919*<\/span><\/p>

The Hills of Han, 1920<\/span><\/p>

In Red and Gold, 1921<\/span><\/p>

Goldie Green, 1922<\/span><\/p>

Old Concord, 1922<\/span><\/p>

Silk, 1923<\/span><\/p>

The Moment of Beauty 1924<\/span><\/p>

The Entertaining Angel, 1926<\/span><\/p>

Old Concord Seen Through Western Spectacles, 1926<\/span><\/p>

Anabel at Sea, 1927<\/span><\/p>

Lady Can Do, 1929<\/span><\/p>

Bad Penny, 1933<\/span><\/p>

Rise and Fight Againe, 1935<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

*Made into a movie.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>

[30]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Joseph Greer and His Daughter<\/span>, pp. 13, 44-47, 99.<\/p><\/div>

[31]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>New York Tribune,<\/span>Nov. 5, 1922, sec. 5, p. 10. The book was made into a movie, \u201cWhat Fools Men,\u201d in 1925. Writing in the\u00a0New York Times,<\/span>Sept. 29, 1925, critic Mordaunt Hall panned the film, saying it was \u201cthe sort of picture one can talk through without missing anything.\u201d<\/p><\/div>

[32]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>New York Times,\u00a0<\/i>Dec. 10, 1932;\u00a0Twentieth Century Authors<\/i>(1942), p. 1487, James D. Hart,\u00a0The Oxford Companion to American Literature,<\/i>5th ed., Oxford University Press, 1983, p. 808.\u00a0<\/p><\/div>

[33]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Webster, \u201cWhat is a Novel, Anyhow?\u201d\u00a0New York Times Book Review and Magazine,<\/i>Oct. 9, 1921.<\/p><\/div>

[34]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>New York Times Magazine,<\/i>Aug. 29, 1915.<\/p><\/div>

[35]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Joyce Kilmer, \u201cSamuel Merwin Says Authors Need a Shock,\u201d\u00a0New York Times Magazine<\/i>, Sept. 5, 1915, p. 17.<\/p><\/div>

[36]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Merwin\u2019s letter of July 10, 1915, in the Henry Kitchell Webster Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago. Quoted by Dalrymple, pp. 97-98.<\/p><\/div>

[37]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Robert Holliday,\u00a0A Chat About Samuel Merwin<\/i>, Bobbs-Merrill, 1922.<\/p><\/div>

[38]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Collier\u2019s,<\/i>Dec. 13, 1924.<\/p><\/div>

[39]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Martin Booth:\u00a0Opium: A History,<\/i>St Martin\u2019s Press, 1998, p. 158.<\/p><\/div>

[40]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Cited by Ellen LaMotte, \u201cGreat Britain\u2019s Opium Monopoly,\u201d Schaffer Library of Drug Policy, www.druglibrary.org\/schaffer\/history\/om\/om1.htm.<\/p><\/div>

[41]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Collier\u2019s,<\/i>Dec. 13, 1924.<\/p><\/div>

[42]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Merwin,The Honey Bee,<\/i>Bobbs Merrill, 1915, pp. 146, 219.<\/p><\/div>

[43]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Holliday,A Chat With Samuel Merwin.<\/i><\/p><\/div>

[44]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Calumet \u201cK,\u201d<\/i>Second Renaissance edition, p. vii.<\/p><\/div>

[45]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Merwin,Henry is Twenty,<\/i>Bobbs-Merrill, 1918, pp. 160, 193, 245-248.<\/p><\/div>

[46]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>August 10, 1919.<\/p><\/div>

[47]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Merwin,The Passionate Pilgrim,<\/i>A.L. Burt, 1919. pp. 145-146.<\/p><\/div>

[48]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Merwin,Rise and Fight Againe<\/i>, New York, Albert & Charles Boni, 1935, pp. 1, 17, 76, 257.<\/p><\/div>

[49]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>His son, Sam Merwin Jr., (1910-1996) was editor of\u00a0Thrilling Wonder Stories<\/i>1945-1951 and wrote the science fiction novels\u00a0The House of Many Worlds<\/i>(1951),\u00a0Three Faces of Time<\/i>(1955),\u00a0The Sex War<\/i>(1960),\u00a0The Time Shifters<\/i>(1971) and\u00a0Chauvinisto<\/i>(1976).<\/p><\/div>

[50]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>A Memoir of Towner Keeney Webster<\/i>, pp. 26-27.<\/p><\/div>

[51]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Collier\u2019s,<\/i>Dec. 13, 1924.<\/p><\/div>

[52]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Merwin letter to Webster, June 22, 1915.<\/p><\/div>

[53]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Merwin-Webster,Comrade John<\/i>, Macmillan, 1907, pp. 72-73, 236, 333-335.<\/p><\/div>

[54]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>Variety<\/i>, Nov. 12, 1915, p. 23. See also\u00a0The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States, Feature Films, 1911-1920,<\/i>Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988, p. 159.<\/p><\/div>

[55]<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>The Passionate Pilgrim,<\/i>pp. 266-268.<\/p><\/div><\/div>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Henry Kitchell Webster \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Samuel Merwin \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I became interested in Merwin and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-471","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1195,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/471\/revisions\/1195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}