U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [531]
A certain Cyrus S. Eaton of Cleveland, an ex-Baptistminister, was the David that brought down this Goliath. Whether it was so or not he made Insul be-lieve that Wal Street was behind him. He started buying stock in the three Chicago
-528-utilities. Insul in a panic for fear he'd lose his control went into the market to buy against him. Final y the Reverend Eaton let himself be bought out, shaking down the old man for a profit of twenty mil ion dol-lars. The stockmarket crash. Paper values were slipping. Insul 's companies
were intertwined in a tangle that no bookkeeper has ever been able to unravel. The gas hissed out of the torn bal oon. Insul
threw away his imperial pride and went on his knees to the bankers.
The bankers had him where they wanted him. To
save the face of the tottering czar he was made a re-ceiver of his own concerns. But the old man couldn't get out of his head the il usion that the money was al his. When it was discovered that he was using the
stockholders' funds to pay off his brothers' brokerage accounts it was too thick even for a federal judge. In-sul was forced to resign. He held directorates in eightyfive companies, he
was chairman of sixtyfive, president of eleven: it took him three hours to sign his resignations.
As a reward for his services to monopoly his com-panies chipped in on a pension of eighteen thousand a year. But the public was shouting for criminal prosecu-tion. When the handouts stopped newspapers and poli-ticians turned on him. Revolt against the moneymanip-ulators was in the air. Samuel Insul got the wind up and ran off to Canada with his wife.
Extradition proceedings. He fled to Paris. When
the authorities began to close in on him there he slipped away to Italy, took a plane to Tirana, another to Sa-loniki and then the train to Athens. There the old fox went to earth. Money talked as sweetly in Athens as it had in Chicago in the old days.
-529-The American ambassador tried to extradite him. Insul hired a chorus of Hel enic lawyers and politicos and sat drinking coffee in the lobby of the Grande Bretagne, while they proceeded to tie up the ambas-sador in a snarl of chicanery as complicated as the book-keeping of his holdingcompanies. The successors of Demosthenes were delighted. The ancestral itch in
many a Hel enic palm was temporarily assuaged. Sam-uel Insul settled down cozily in Athens, was stirred by the sight of the Parthenon, watched the goats feed-ing on the Pentelic slopes, visited the Areopagus, ad-mired marble fragments ascribed to Phidias, talked with the local bankers about reorganizing the public utilities of Greece, was said to be promoting Macedo-nian lignite. He was the toast of the Athenians; Mme. Kouryoumd jouglou the vivacious wife of a Bagdad
datemerchant devoted herself to his comfort. When
the first effort at extradition failed, the old gentleman declared in the courtroom, as he struggled out from the embraces of his four lawyers: Greece is a small but great country. The idyl was interrupted when the Roosevelt Ad-ministration began to put the heat on the Greek foreign office. Government lawyers in Chicago were accumu-lating truckloads of evidence and chalking up more and more drastic indictments.
Final y after many a postponement (he had hired
physicians as wel as lawyers, they cried to high heaven that it would kil him to leave the genial climate of the Attic plain),
he was ordered to leave Greece as an undesirable
alien to the great indignation of Balkan society and of Mme. Kouryoumdjouglou. He hired the Maiotis a smal and grubby Greek freighter and panicked the foreignnews services by
slipping off for an unknown destination.
-530-It was rumored that the new Odysseus was bound for Aden, for the islands of the South Seas, that he'd been invited to Persia. After a few days he turned up rather seasick in the Bosporus on his way, it was said, to Rumania where Madame Kouryoumdjouglou had advised him to put himself under the protection of her friend la Lupescu.
At the request of the American ambassador the
Turks were delighted to drag him off the Greek