Theodore Dreiser's Hosmer Hand, Political "Big Thinker"

In the course of fighting their war against Frank Cowperwood in The Titan his enemies Norman Schryhart and Hosmer Hand made the fullest use of their control of Chicago's newspapers to mobilize public opinion against Cowperwood and his pursuit of a long street-car franchise in the city on the terms that would have made it truly profitable to him. This campaign extends to those newspapers carrying calls for reform that would have included mandated lower fares and a tax on the monopoly's revenue. Being themselves not just businessmen but no progressives the fact that Schryhart and Hand sanction the newspapers carrying such content is a reflection of how far they are ready to go in their hostility to Frank--for their countenancing such policies even in the most cynical, tactical fashion ("distrusting this radical palaver" but "Still, anything to hurt Cowperwood--anything") still makes them uncomfortable, especially Hosmer, who denounces the idea of lower fares or of such a tax as the "socialism" he saw as "a horrible importation of monarchy-ridden Europe." Indeed, considering those calls for reform, which he worries it may be beyond the papers to "smooth . . . over later" in what he worries "is a restless, socialistic country, and Chicago . . . the very hotbed and center of it," Hosmer moans inwardly "Why couldn't the people be satisfied to allow the strong, intelligent, God-fearing men of the community to arrange things for them?" After all, "Wasn't that what democracy meant?"

Reading Hosmer's panic over socialism, and his understanding of "democracy" as a social order where oligarchs like him and his partners pursue their venal stupidities without challenge many would laugh today. That is not because his views are unheard of now but because they are all too familiar to us in more recent times. Over a century on Hosmer's view remains the conventional wisdom of elites like him and Schryhart, their court philosophers (the bit about socialism as "a horrible importation of monarchy-ridden Europe" could have been plucked out of "consensus historian" Louis Hartz's writing), and those they charge with forming Public Opinion, whose notions of "democracy," "freedom," "liberty" and the rest can seem to them just the "Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Individualism."