Kane and Abel/Sons of Fortune Read online

  As the fateful day approached, it became clear that most of the politically aware students, professors and even some Boston and Cambridge notables would be attending. On the morning before the two friends walked over to the Yard to discover who their opposition would be.

  “Leland Crosby and Thaddeus Cohen. Either name ring a bell with you, William? Crosby must be one of the Philadelphia Crosbys, I suppose.”

  “Of course he is. ‘The Red Maniac of Rittenhouse Square,’ as his own aunt once described him. Accurately. He’s the most convincing revolutionary on campus. He’s loaded and he spends all his money on the popular radical causes. I can hear his opening now.”

  William parodied Crosby’s grating tone. “‘I know at first hand the rapacity and the utter lack of social conscience of the American monied class.’ If everyone in the audience hasn’t already heard that fifty times, I’d say he’ll make a formidable opponent.”

  “And Thaddeus Cohen?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  The following evening, refusing to admit to stage fright, they made their way through the snow and cold wind, heavy overcoats flapping behind them, past the gleaming columns of the Widener Library—like William’s father, the donor’s son had gone down on the Titanic—to Boylston Hall.

  “With weather like this, at least if we take a beating, there won’t be many to tell the tale,” said Matthew hopefully.

  But as they rounded the side of the library, they could see a steady stream of stamping, huffing figures ascending the stairs and filing into the hall. Inside, they were shown to chairs on the podium. William sat still, but his eyes picked out the people he knew in the audience: President Lowell, sitting discreetly in a middle row; ancient Newbury St. John, professor of botany; a pair of Brattle Street bluestockings he recognized from Red House parties; and, to his right, a group of Bohemian-looking young men and women, some not even wearing ties, who turned and started to clap as their spokesmen—Crosby and Cohen—walked onto the stage.

  Crosby was the more striking of the two, tall and thin almost to the point of caricature, dressed absentmindedly—or very carefully—in a shaggy tweed suit but with a stiffly pressed shirt, and dangling a pipe with no apparent connection to his body except at his lower lip. Thaddeus Cohen was shorter and wore rimless glasses and an almost too perfectly cut dark worsted suit.

  The four speakers shook hands cautiously as the lastminute arrangements were made. The bells of Memorial Church, only a hundred feet away, sounded vague and distant as they rang out seven times.

  “Mr. Leland Crosby, Junior,” said the captain.

  Crosby’s speech gave William cause for self-congratulation. He had anticipated everything—the strident tone Crosby would take, the overstressed, nearly hysterical points he would make. He recited the incantations of American radicalism—Haymarket, Money Trust, Standard Oil, even Cross of Gold. William didn’t think Crosby had made more than an exhibition of himself although he garnered the expected applause from his claque on William’s right. When Crosby sat down, he had clearly won no new supporters and it looked as though he might have lost a few old ones. The comparison with William and Matthew—equally rich, equally socially distinguished but selfishly refusing martyrdom for the cause of the advancement of social justice—just might be devastating.

  Matthew spoke well and to the point, soothing his listeners, the incarnation of liberal toleration. William pumped his friend’s hand warmly when he returned to his chair to loud applause.

  “It’s all over but the shouting, I think,” he whispered.

  But Thaddeus Cohen surprised virtually everyone. He had a pleasant, diffident manner and a sympathetic style. His references and quotations were catholic, pointed and illuminating. Without conveying to the audience the feeling that it was being deliberately impressed, he exuded a moral earnestness that made anything less seem a failure to a rational human being. He was willing to admit the excesses of his own side and the inadequacy of its leaders, but he left the impression that, in spite of its dangers, there was no alternative to socialism if the lot of mankind was ever to be improved.

  William was flustered. A surgically logical attack on the political platform of his adversaries would be useless against Cohen’s gentle and persuasive presentation. Yet to outdo him as a spokesman of hope and faith in the human spirit would be impossible. William concentrated first on refuting some of Crosby’s charges and then countered Cohen’s arguments with a declaration of his own faith in the ability of the American system to produce the best results through competition, intellectual and economic. He felt he had played a good defensive game, but no more, and sat down supposing that he had been well beaten by Cohen.

  Crosby was his opponents’ rebuttal speaker. He began ferociously, sounding as if he now needed to beat Cohen as much as William and Matthew, asking the audience if they could identify an “enemy of the people” among themselves that night. He glared around the room for several long seconds as members of the audience squirmed in embarrassed silence and his dedicated supporters studied their shoes. Then he learned forward and roared:

  “He stands before you. He has just spoken in your midst. His name is William Lowell Kane.” Gesturing with one hand toward William—but without looking at him—he thundered: “His bank owns mines in which the workers die to give its owners an extra million a year in dividends. His bank supports the bloody, corrupt dictatorships of Latin America. Through his bank, the American Congress is bribed into crushing the small farmer. His bank …”

  The tirade went on for several minutes. William sat in stony silence, occasionally jotting down a comment on his yellow legal pad. A few members of the audience had begun shouting “No.” Crosby’s supporters shouted loyally back. The officials began to look nervous.

  Crosby’s allotted time was about up. He raised his fist and said, “Gentlemen, I submit that not more than two hundred yards from this very room we have the answer to the plight of America. There stands the Widener Library, the greatest private library in the world. Here poor and immigrant scholars come, along with the best-educated Americans, to increase the knowledge and prosperity of the world. Why does it exist? Because one rich playboy had the misfortune to set sail sixteen years ago on a pleasure boat called the Titanic. I suggest, ladies and gentlemen, that not until the people of America hand each and every member of the ruling class a ticket for his own private cabin on the Titanic of capitalism, will the hoarded wealth of this great continent be freed and devoted to the service of liberty, equality and progress.”

  As Matthew listened to Crosby’s speech, his sentiments changed from exultation that, by this blunder, the victory had been secured for his side, through embarrassment at the behavior of his adversary, to rage at the reference to the Titanic. He had no idea how William would respond to such provocation.

  When some measure of silence had been restored, the captain walked to the lectern and said, “Mr. William Lowell Kane.”

  William strode to the platform and looked out over the audience. An expectant hush filled the room.

  “It is my opinion that the views expressed by Mr. Crosby do not merit a response.”

  He sat down. There was a moment of surprised silence—and then loud applause.

  The captain returned to the platform but appeared uncertain what to do. A voice from behind him broke the tension.

  “If I may, Mr. Chairman, I would like to ask Mr. Kane if I might use his rebuttal time.” It was Thaddeus Cohen.

  William nodded his agreement to the captain.

  Cohen walked to the lectern and blinked at the audience disarmingly. “It has long been true,” he began, “that the greatest obstacle to the success of democratic socialism in the United States has been the extremism of some of its allies. Nothing could have exemplified this unfortunate fact more clearly than my colleague’s speech tonight. The propensity to damage the progressive cause by calling for the physical extermination of those who oppose it might be understandable in a battle-hardene