Mr. Orpheus of Boston

Thomas W. Lawson, as Orpheus, plays a lyre while sitting beneath a tree on a hillside in a pastoral setting. In the foreground are John D. Rockefeller, James R. Keene, J. Edward Addicks, and Henry H. Rogers as wild animals that have become entranced by the music. In the middle distance, a sheep lies on its back.

comments and context

Comments and Context

The mythical Greek god, repository of perhaps the most attributes and personality traits of any god, added facets and powers in various tales through the centuries. No manifestation was more unlikely than in the person of Thomas W. Lawson in this Puck cartoon by Joseph Keppler Junior.

The legend of Orpheus is most often associated with the god’s ability to charm people, creatures, and even rocks and trees, with the music of his lyre. In this cartoon Lawson is not enchanting the titans of finance, but rather driving them crazy.

The context is necessary for understanding the cartoon. Lawson had advanced from a position as a company clerk to a corporation manger, thence to a famous stock speculator, becoming a millionaire in the process. He cast an eye on the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, which had been founded by Marcus Daly originally as a silver-mining concern that expanded to copper and other metals. For a time Daly partnered with George Hearst, father of publisher William Randolph Hearst, and a nibing mogul. In 1899 Lawson joined with William Rockefeller (not his brother John D. Rockefeller, who is caricatured in Keppler’s cartoon) and Henry H. Rogers.

Rogers was associated with Standard Oil, but he involved himself with Amalgamated — eventually Anaconda Copper — independently. John D. Rockefeller declined to join the enterprise, which he thought reeked of speculation and manipulation, or it would, under Lawson.

Indeed the copper company of Lawson, William Rockefeller, and Henry Rogers engaged in the worst practices imputed to titans of finance: watering its share values, cornering the market on copper (eventually owning mines as far away as Chile), creating false shortages to initiate panic selling on Wall Street, and then buying their shares back at reduced values, colluding with other miners and foreign competition, the expropriation by the Allende government in Chile, and eventual charges of pollution. Frequently under investigation by various government agencies and exposed by journalists, Anaconda’s activities continued through the 1929 stock-market crash. Critics have charged that the stock market crash and Depression was partly its fault. 

Lawson wrote a series of articles for Everybody’s Magazine in the last months of 1904 which were immediately collected in a book the next year. The articles created a national sensation, and the book was a best-seller. Everybody’s was known as a muckraking magazine, and Lawson’s series of articles were as sensational as any exposes of the era, ranking with Ida Tarbell’s series on Standard Oil, David Graham Phillips’ articles on corruption in the United States Senate, or Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle.

It is to be remembered that the name “muckraker” was applied by President Roosevelt, and was at first a pejorative, a warning, borrowed from The Pilgrim’s Progress, against the Man with the Muck-Rake who constantly looks at the mire below him and never upward to bright skies.

“Frenzied Finance, the Crime of Amalgamated” was the title of his articles and the subsequent books published by Ridgway-Thayer, a company owned by the publishers of Everybody’s. It is likely that the public’s growing appetite for reform — so charged as to overlook the hyperbolic elements in Sinclair’s The Jungle — immediately anointed Lawson as a “reformed” reformer, going public with his corrupt ways, baring all his sins on Wall Street. And so history has largely painted him.

However, such was not the nature of Frenzied Finance. Yes, there were exposures and various crimes and near-crimes were limned. But the truth is that Lawson had had a falling out with his partners, so his book raked muck indeed, but Lawson was not exactly repentant about some of his misdeeds. Rather, he was brazen and otherwise tattled on his his former partners. It was a “tell all” motivated by revenge. Generally, the public forgave his sins as it consumed the scandals and offenses of Rockefeller, Rogers, and other leading figures. Those partners indeed writhed as Lawson played his lyre.

Separated from the corporation he helped fund, Lawson became an advocate for finance reform, but usually viewed as half-hearted and often as self-serving. He patented furniture designs, wrote a novel, bought a yacht that foundered on rocks in Sicily, built extravagant homes, lost a son in an accident, and died in poverty, a diabetic on an operating table in 1925.

Collection

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs

Creation Date

1905-01-11

Creator(s)

Keppler, Udo J., 1872-1956

Period

U.S. President – 1st Term (September 1901-February 1905)

Repository

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Page Count

1

Record Type

Image

Resource Type

Cartoon

Rights

These images are presented through a cooperative effort between the Library of Congress and Dickinson State University. No known restrictions on publication.

Citation