IMPERIAL By R. F. PETTIGREW The Story of CHICAGO E . P52 Copyright 1922 by R. F. Pettigrew. All rights, including the right of translation into foreign languages, reserved. Published October 1, 1922. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, 80 Wahr 1-24-47 14343 PUBLISHERS' NOTE The substance of the present volume was privately printed in New York in January, 1922, under another title. Commenting on this book Mr. Charles Edward Russell, justly prominent among present-day writers and judges of good writing, said: This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary man. No one that reads it impartially will be satisfied with any verdict less emphatic. Probably no other public man still among us has had an equal chance to see without illusions the inside of our political machinery. Certainly no other public man would have the courage to write with equal candor of what he saw, or thought he saw. Even men that have believed themselves sophisticated about our public affairs will receive many a shock as they read here. To the rest the book is like a continuous electric battery, only stronger. . . With scornful eye and a marvelously retentive memory, Senator Pettigrew for twelve years surveyed from his seat the workings of the Senate and the real characters and performances of his fellow members. The results he has set down in vitriol. Scarcely a conspicuous man of his times escapes his burning. The huge control that the moneyed interests exercise upon government, the rapacity and cruelty of the profit-mongers, the difference between the politician's unctuous play-acting and his slimy deed, the spread between reputation and fact concerning many of these men-all the sordid stupidity and murderous greed of our social system one may find set forth here in most novel and stimulating fashion. Mr. Pettigrew is not a trained writer. All the better for his purpose. He goes at the thing hammer and tongs, calls people names, bursts out into vehement tirades, flips from his pen "scoundrel", "rascal" and "scamp", pushes over the popular idols, tells us we are fools to think well of this man or that, runs both horns along the shelves of the national china shop, and prances on the fragments, is bitter, extravagant, unphilosophical, wrong-headed, violent, perfectly natural and extremely entertaining and profitable. Everybody should read this book. It is not necessary (and probably to those that retain some sense of proportion and fact it is impossble) to go along with the vehement author, but everybody should read it to get a notion of the flubdub, hypocrisy and fake that belong in public life. It will not be an accurate notion, but the trouble is that elsewhere you can get none at all. Therefore, read this. We do not have to believe, because Senator Pettigrew believes it, that Samuel Gompers is the king of organized labor and can order it about like a foreman of coolies. We do not have to believe that the evils in our social and political state are due to the machinations of a small group of very bad men with whom may the devil fly away. We do not have to accept the sheep-and-goats theory of human life because it seems to have made a great impression on him. Those that are familiar with the psychology of the American wage-worker will be astonished at his faith in an easily accomplished proletarian revolution here. But all these defects that might ruin another book only make this the more attractive. Because, however far this man's excursions may wander from cool reason and things as they are, he is so manifestly sincere that you cannot help liking him even when most you disagree with his text. I particularly recommend the book to those that are weary of the pedantic twaddle and verbal genuflections of the schoolmen. Here is something real; here is a man on the level. O rare and joyous discovery! Let him batter the social structure with mattocks and shiver its windows with bricks if he will at least he feels something and means something, and a country half choked with rhetoric ought to hail him with grateful relief. |