Gain

by Richard Powers

  General Motors and Union Carbide saved the world for democracy. Du Pont fired one shell in every five, laundering its windfall millions by expanding into paints and polymers. Government had no choice but to join hands with industry in the nation’s interests. In 1919, when four million strikers threatened to rip society apart, only government’s residual wartime powers finally forced the last militant miner back to work. Debs went to jail for violating the Espionage Act. The business of America would never again be anything but business.

  The trusts now came out from behind their protective machinery. They did away with their grosser tactics, rendered obsolete by triumph. Corporations no longer needed to fear anything from the public. For the new stockholding public was squarely behind them, ready to sign for anything printed on the proxy ballot.

  “War baby” stocks hit the roof and then kept right on rising. Their swell carried a raft of related equities up with them. The taxi drivers of New York became self-styled brokers. Maids and butlers took to speculating on 10 percent margins. Kids cried at Christmas when they got toys instead of Type A Preferred.

  Clare’s employees had been spoon-fed the pleasures of stockholding long before the public at large discovered them. Their steady willingness to put aside wages to purchase shares at discount prices kept demand firm and the performance of Clare Common flawless.

  Even as the firm’s equities began to take off, Douglas Sr. succumbed to the Spanish influenza. Worldwide, the end-of-war pandemic claimed twice as many lives as had the conflict. No one at Clare thought the chief would ever succumb to anything, least of all something as absurd as a microbe. The old raw rail still walked coatless to work, daily, even through snowstorms. But Douglas died all the same, despite long hours, an iron constitution, and the most expensive doctors money could buy.

  His unplanned death left a vacuum at the top of the organizational chart. Douglas Jr. seemed singularly uninterested in any job that would interfere too much with a life of galleries and triforia. None of Douglas’s other sons had risen above the level of inept assistant plant manager. Peter had left no children. As the senior Clare in either branch of the family, William figured the company was his for the taking.

  But it had been decades since the firm had been a genuine family concern. Hiram Nagel, the handpicked prodigy whose sweaty folksiness had held Peter Clare in horrified fascination, chose to fight William for the run of the company. Nagel had learned, over the years, to forgo the yellow-checked suits. He’d mastered the difference between the soap you sold to the common man and the self you sold to your business associates. He’d done as much with nothing as anyone in his line could have. Now he wanted one more sale.

  William outgunned the upstart Nagel in percent of equity controlled. But the treasurer, despite his magic name and large block of shares, hadn’t a chance against the advertising genius when it came to promoting himself to both board and stockholders. All William’s handpicked inside men elected to pass him over. They called him too old, too frugal, too tied to the past.

  Had bitterness been cost-efficient, William might have let himself get bitter. Instead, he settled for a ceremonial Chairmanship. He strengthened his profit-sharing scheme through several overhauls. He implemented a guaranteed-work plan. He found ways to finance the greatest period of expansion the company would ever enjoy. And he commenced a gradual, decade-long sell-off of his own stock into a climbing market.

  And so the Jazz Age opened with no Clare at the helm of Clare. The soap cake that the family had crafted succeeded beyond anything any one of them could have predicted for it. The shape had outlived the sum of its shapers. The peddler now owned the production line.

  The company structure that the vanished generations had jointly fashioned seemed only to have been waiting for the twenties to vindicate it. The nation was a silent-film showgirl, giddy with confidence, one step ahead of the censors. Yet for all its Charleston-shimmying out between the struts of biplanes, the age raised management to absolute ascendancy. As Capone summed it up: “This American system . . . call it what you like, gives to each and every one of us a great opportunity if we only seize it . . .” To this businessman’s credit, the protection rates that Capone charged Clare’s Chicago warehouses were never anything but competitive.

  Radio linked all peoples in an instant community. Couéism promoted self-improvement to the level of religion. Millions of people took to chanting to themselves: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” “All Races,” Clare proudly declared, “are learning new and improved ways to fight harmful body odors.”

  Charles Ponzi’s postal voucher scheme paid its early investors a 100 percent return on investment, with money obtained from later investors. After ducking out early from his jail sentence, Ponzi slipped down to Florida and briefly turned a brisk trade in underwater lots. For all the age’s losers, for all the hedgers, for all those not yet flush enough to invest, Clare offered something “Greater than Riches: that grade school complexion.”

  Prohibition shut down the Double Eagle Whiskey Distillery. Two years later, the law lured the subsidiary to test the waters with a magnificent site near Windsor, Canada. Never more than a mama-papa sideline, the Alcoholic Beverages Department grew sea legs while abroad. Soon enough, it was doing a far healthier business than it had in the years before America went dry. Ads were mostly word of mouth.

  American per capita soap consumption continued to rise as rapidly as the national appetite and fortune. Yet soap was fast becoming the most competitive good then being sold. No article was advertised more heavily. Even the floating soaps required a constant buoy of new promotions to keep from sinking. The prosperity revolution left America awash in a glut of goods. The business of manufacturing necessities now fell behind the broader effort of manufacturing needs.

  Marketing experimented with coupons: “Take this clipping to your grocer, along with two cents . . .” “I want to take the two-week New-Dawn test. Mail me my absolutely free trial bar to: . . . Only one sample per address.”

  But war had matured the public. It had grown sophisticated, jaded. Homey poetry and sentimental art no longer sold it on anything. Nagel, his hands full with other expansions, accepted the inevitable and professionalized all promotional materials. Clare’s old space broker, Thompson, now wrote all its copy as well. The story of Clare would henceforth be handled by frustrated New York novelists who had never set foot in a factory, who didn’t know their acids from their bases, and who couldn’t make a soft soap to save their lives. In these hands, Snowdrop went snazzy, out there on the biplane wing, knocking its knees together alongside all the other jazz babies.

  “Queenly Beauty for One Thin Dime,” the Thompson Agency promised:

  The same mixture of sumptuous and unguent oils that graced the palaces of Egypt, Crete, and Babylon is yours in each bar of Cleopatra Beauty Soap. All the arts this ancient queen of beauty commanded come together to cleanse, protect, heal, and smooth your modern-day skin. Cleopatra Beauty Soap blends together only the finest and most expensive oils of coconut palm and olive to bring you the luxury that formerly only queens could afford. By importing these rare oils in massive quantities, and by working its factories day and night, Clare can offer you this costly luxury for only ten cents, no more than plain soap. The gigantic volume and great popularity of this exclusive blend thus benefit all its users, bringing the world of exotic beauty secrets within easy reach of everyone.

  Shrinking profit margins and the rising costs of relentless competition forced the company to diversify on all fronts. The Industrial Goods Department began to lose its ad hoc quality and acquire the rational organization and volume distribution that Personal Goods had perfected. The bleaches and disinfectants groups were reorganized under the Consumer Goods unit. The Georgia seed-crushing enterprise as well as Lacewood’s fertilizer and pesticide plants entered the age of galvanized steel and modern management. The firm dumped its uncompetitive process chemicals efforts, while the smaller drug a
nd medical lines were brought together in their own department.

  While soap still floated the bulk of the enterprise, the existing Consumer Products Department began to expand so roundly into other operations that it bewildered even the knot of new college whiz kids who organized the expansion. The plan was simple enough: a pyramiding scheme that really worked, because the pyramid was theoretically infinite.

  First, an analyst whose full-time job it was to scout the industry would identify a promising consumer good that bore some relation to an existing Clare line. The company’s experience with lard, for example, prepared a jumping-off point for shortening. The scout would locate some small shortening firm, one that was earnest, expert, but utterly hopeless when it came to market share. The target’s business prospects meant little or nothing.

  Clare would acquire the small company, usually through stock transfers that did not reduce available cash. Then it would ship its engineers and managers out to the newly acquired plant, anywhere from Jacksonville to Walla Walla. Clare employees descended upon the little outfit like exchange students on the Sorbonne. And they would proceed to run the new toy train set not with an eye toward profit but for the pure technical experience.

  Once Clare’s men learned, in this lab school, all the do’s and don’ts of the new process, it was time to scale up. They would salvage what they could of the existing physical plant and sell the rest for scrap. They would transfer the best of the old skilled workers to a new, state-of-the-art plant erected in an ideal location, one that benefited from Clare’s golden name, executive experience, and growing distribution arm.

  Within a few years, the careful training and groundwork generally paid off. The new plant would begin earning enough to defray its own costs, generating enough surplus to launch the process all over again. So shortening would lead to oleomargarine, and oleomargarine to emulsified ice cream. And each new adopted child inherited all the contagions of fitness and fortune that the name Clare had come to stand for.

  The factories in Liverpool, Lille, and Münster rooted in their transplanted soils like native growths. The suave and cultivated Douglas II went abroad to become Chief of European Operations, splitting his time between the factory towns and his villa in Vézelay. The plants belonged to Clare, but bore only material resemblance to their American cousins. They operated on local principles and employed local labor. And for legal and cultural reasons, all Clare’s familiar brand names assumed different European identities.

  Europe’s polyglot stew presented intractable problems on this score, until Douglas II hit upon certain synthetic names that had sonorous, neutral associations in most major tongues. His happiest invention, Clarea, played well across all borders. Nothing in those years gave Douglas greater pleasure than making a soap in Germany that the Germans thought was French, and one in France that the French thought was Italian.

  The possibilities of expansion spread before the firm without limit. In 1927, Nagel snatched up Sparkle Soap of Oakland, a familiar if aging household name. The acquisition completed the expansion of Clare’s manufacturing facilities into total continental coverage. And overnight, the move left them a key player in the burgeoning mouthwash business, a twenties epidemic among the newly rich. Clare’s little antiseptic line, languishing since the Civil War, erupted with the invention of a market for germ-free breath. Thompson sold the gargle with what looked like hospital public service announcements.

  The Sparkle takeover was expensive, but Clare’s soaring common stock gave it considerable leverage. Patience, pruning, and several excellent packing plants promised steady and swelling yields for as long as Clare cared to harvest them. But Hiram Nagel was not a patient man. No matter how fast all the individual slices were growing, he wanted the whole pie.

  With close-kept secrecy, Nagel steered his board into the deal of the century. The plan originated at J. P. Morgan’s rival house, National City, and it grew to maturity over at Clare’s great rival, Colgate-Palmolive-Peet. Although most companies still paid lip service to competition, many had begun to tally up what competition cost them. Clare and Colgate had spent hundreds of thousands over the years in a fruitless attempt to best each other. At last, Colgate came to Clare with a very simple suggestion: if you can’t beat them, why not join them?

  The plan was nothing if not bold, a fitting climax to the flashiest decade in American history. It aimed at building nothing less than the largest and most powerful food, drug, and personal hygiene corporation in the United States, perhaps the world. Kraft-Phenix Cheese, at 38 million, was already in. So was Hershey Chocolate, at 25 million. The group was working on the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea, Hormel, and a cannery worthy of inclusion in such company.

  It was, by all vantages, a match made in heaven, albeit packaged and marketed in an angel-free zone. Manufacturers and retailers, linked together to take the goods right from the factory to the consumer: horizontal and vertical integration on a scale that would stun even boom-time America. The plan seemed the perfect extension of the trajectory that Clare had been following for decades.

  Clare’s stock had risen at an annual rate close to 30 percent over the previous five years. But not even that run-up compared to what happened the week word of the merger leaked out to the Street. The stock traded throughout that spring between a low of 38¼ and a high of 43½. By the beginning of fall, it had touched 70.

  The merger participants gathered together to sign their names to the agreement on October 20, 1929. That afternoon, the markets began to sputter. Nine days later, a cascade of margin calls wiped away a tenth of the market’s worth. When the slaughter ended, enough wealth to pay for another World War had vanished in a cloud of smoke and mirrors.

  Among the Crash’s lesser casualties was the monster merger contract. Clare’s stock fell from 69¾ to a long and obstinate 13. Colgate dropped from 90 to an eventual 7. All parties scrambled to extract themselves from the rubble of the collapsed tower. The contract now meant nothing, for meeting the agreement would require even more fiction than the fiction that had just exploded.

  And on November 1, All Saints’, Hiram Nagel, the hick kid from Kentucky, the farmer-voiced, silver-tongued, complaints-letter answerer whom Peter Clare raised to greatness because he sweated just as profusely as the great unwashed, was found behind his president’s desk, dead. No contemporary newspaper or subsequent corporate history ever adequately explained the circumstances.

  A rocky prominence, like a volcanic cone, teems with a continuous carpet of people. Mostly we see their hats, although here and there a body manages to hoist itself up onto an outcrop. Top hats, felt hats, berets, porkpies, tam-o’-shanters, caps, fedoras: the whole socioeconomic gamut surges as one toward the summit in the distance, where a tiny suited figure holds up a celebratory bottle against the halo of a sun whose corona reads: “HEART’S DESIRE.” To the lower right, a small insert shows a neat dresser top with comb, brush, perfectly folded towel and washcloth, and bar reading “SOAP.”

  A KIT FOR CLIMBERS

  Hard work, courage, common sense will prove stout aids on your way up in the world. But don’t overlook another, one that is tied up with good manners—cleanliness.

  Any way you look at it, clean habits, clean homes, clean linen have a value socially and commercially. How many successful men and women do you know who are not constantly careful of personal appearance and personal cleanliness?

  In any path of life, that long way to the top is hard enough—so make the going easier with soap and water.

  For Health and Wealth use SOAP & WATER

  PUBLISHED BY THE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN SOAP AND

  GLYCERINE PRODUCERS, INC., TO AID THE WORK

  OF CLEANLINESS INSTITUTE

  (Ladies’ Home Journal, August 1928)

  No longer her home, this place they have given her to inhabit. She cannot hike from the living room to the kitchen without passing an exhibit. Floor by Germ-Guard. Windows by Cleer-Thru. Table by Colonial-Cote. The Bodey Mansion, that B-ti
cket, one-star museum of trade. But where else can she live?

  She vows a consumer boycott, a full spring cleaning. But the house is full of them. It’s as if the floor she walks on suddenly liquefies into a sheet of termites. They paper her cabinets. They perch on her microwave, camp out on her stove, hang from her shower head. Clare hiding under the sink, swarming her medicine chest, lining the shelves in the basement, parked out in the garage, piled up in the shed.

  Her vow is hopeless. Too many to purge them all. Every hour of her life depends on more corporations than she can count. And any spray she might use to bomb the bugs would have to be Clare’s, too.

  Who told them to make all these things? But she knows the answer to that one. They’ve counted every receipt, more carefully than she ever has. And wasn’t she born wanting what they were born wanting to give her? Every thought, every pleasure, freed up by these little simplicities, the most obvious of them already worlds beyond her competence.

  The newspapers, Don, the lawyers: everybody outraged at the offense. As if cancer just blew in through the window. Well, if it did, it was an inside job. Some accomplice, opening the latch for it. She cannot sue the company for raiding her house. She brought them in, by choice, toted them in a shopping bag. And she’d do it all over again, given the choice. Would have to.

  And if some company got together, came up with something for her, for what has happened, some fruit-scented spray that would return her to all those blissful, carefree assumptions: well, they could name their price. Cancer-Be-Gone. She’d sell just about anything but the kids to get it. If the cure lasted for only, say, ten years, at the end of which the vendor wanted the most unthinkable item in trade, she’d still sign.

  She cannot watch television now, even old movies. The radio is a painful shaggy-dog joke. Magazines and newspapers know what has happened to her, and they bait her with page after page of full-color burlesque. Her own kids now seem like walking billboards to her, their legible clothing proclaiming, Kiss Me, I’m Current, I’m Knowing, I’m Pliant, I’m Lost.