The Solomon Scandals A Washington newspaper novel by David Rothman

Free Upton Sinclair classic tells how Wall Street manipulators can cheat the rest of us

Sy Solomon’s spe­cialty is rip­ping off the taxpayers—through shoddy con­trac­tion prac­tices in an IRS-occupied build­ing and other projects.

If, how­ever, you want a nice overview of a whole litany of white-collar crimes, why not down­load a free copy of an Amer­i­can clas­sic called The Money Chang­ers?

Upton Sin­clair’s novel from the early 20th cen­tury gives us the whole works or close to it—for exam­ple, stock mar­ket manip­u­la­tion, insider trad­ing and related pump-and-dump schemes, use of friends and rel­a­tives to pro­vide cor­po­rate ser­vices, monop­o­lies and ruth­less crimes against rivals, lethal corner-cutting in the areas of worker safety and defense con­tract­ing, cor­rup­tion of news­pa­pers. Always, always, Sin­clair writes of peo­ple, not just of sins as abstrac­tions, and in fact a swin­dled socialite kills her­self in the next-to-last chapter.

The Money Chang­ers should be required read­ing in schools of busi­ness, law, jour­nal­ism and account­ing; and accred­it­ing agen­cies should imme­di­ately drop schools that don’t heed the just-given advice. You can down­load free copies from Google Book Search, Manybooks.net and Project Guten­berg.

Thanks to the SEC in the U.S. and sim­i­lar agen­cies in other coun­tries, finan­cial chi­canery may not be as com­mon as it was in 1908 when Sin­clair pub­lished his novel. But it does go on, as shown by the Mad­off scan­dals, which actu­ally involved a pyra­mid scheme. No doubt sim­i­lar crimes were hap­pen­ing in the Sin­clair era as well. The glory of The Money Chang­ers is that it takes us every­where, from a New York hotel room of col­lud­ing financiers to a Mis­sis­sippi steel mill where a worker dies caught up in machin­ery. Sinclair’s mor­al­iz­ing at times can be a lit­tle heavy handed, but the plot­ting and real­ism com­pelled me to read on. Here is a snip­pet of dia­logue from a journalist:

“…We had the great­est scoop that a news­pa­per ever had in this country–if only the Express were a news­pa­per. But Hodges isn’t pub­lish­ing the news, you see; he’s serv­ing his mas­ters, who­ever they are. I knew that it meant trou­ble when he bought into the Express. He used to be man­ag­ing edi­tor of the Gazette, you know; and he made his for­tune sell­ing the pol­icy of that paper—its finan­cial news is edited to this very hour in the offices of Wyman’s bankers, and I can prove it to any­body who wants me to. That’s the sort of propo­si­tion a man’s up against; and what’s the use of gath­er­ing the news?”

Some­thing to think about, no—when the AP and friends war against new media rivals? The more play­ers, the more chance of manip­u­la­tion being exposed: both the finan­cial kind and the media kind. While media manip­u­la­tion nowa­days tends not to be as direct as described above, it isn’t as if more sub­tle forms have died out.

Related: The Brass Check, about news­pa­pers, and of course Sinclair’s most famous book, The Jun­gle, his expose of the meat packers.