I just had the pleasure of preparing a chapter from Flynn’s Men of Wealth for publication here. It is on the fortune and life of Basil Zaharoff, the arms merchant who made fantastic amounts of money selling guns to all sides of the world’s war conflicts before, during, and after WWI.
Every business attracts to itself men who have the taste, talent, and the morals suited to its special requirements. This armament world of Europe was a behind-the-scenes world of intrigue, chicanery, hypocrisy, and corruption. It involved a weird marriage between burning patriotism and cold, ruthless realism. And the men who rose to leadership in it were men who combined the vices of the spy, the bribe giver, the corruptionist. They played with an explosive far more volatile and dangerous than anything made in their laboratories — chauvinism — and they did it with ruthless realism. There was, indeed, something singularly brutal about their realism.
It’s a fantastically alarming story, one that Flynn tells with relish and style. It was 1941 when Flynn wrote this book. He was the last of a type: a genuine old liberal who appreciated freedom but doubted the merits of the corporate class as a means to protect it. He was scandalized at the New Deal, which he regard as nothing short of a fascistic corporate plot to protect profits in a time when the people were suffering. To his shock he found himself nearly alone among his contemporaries, as all his liberal friends became FDR cheerleaders and, thereby, supporters of the corporate state they had worked decades to oppose.
One of the chapters of this book that he been on my mind constantly is the first one, on Jacob Fugger. He was brilliant, visionary, and tremendously productive but he lacked a keen ethical sense, and sadly the state for him for an occasion of sin. So too for all the people chronicled in this book. For some, the results were worse then others.
