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.
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Jeff, you and the Mises Institute have rendered a huge service to humanity by webbing these books. I agree that _Men of Wealth_ is an absorbing work by someone familiar with history and economics.
A fascinating individual, I suspect we owe a lot of history to him. Great work publishing this.
A fascinating reading!
Note: there are a few typos here and there, particularly nasty are these two misprints:
- Caillard knew how to mix the hard, cruel funcBASIL ZAHAROFF 351 tions of gun-making finance
– But there were BASIL ZAHAROFF 369 many millions left.
You surely want to fix that… it spoils the good article.
Fixed! Thanks
Basil was an interesting chap all right. You mention Lieutenant Colonel Walter Guinness, member for Bury St.Edmonds. It would have been Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk.
I have read this with interest as I have recently found, when clearing my parents’ house in the UK, a collection of cuttings from British newspapers in the 1920s and 1930s regarding Zaharoff. there are also some letters signed by him ,addressed to my grandfather, written on stationery from the Hotel de Paris in Monte Carlo in 1931.
My grandfather, who I never met, worked for Vickers and visited Zaharoff in his chataeu in France.
Having read Peddlar of Death by Donald McCormick (Macdonald press 1965) I have become intrigued by Zaharoff. I see him as a sociopath, an immensely intelligent, powerful manipulator and a man with the most astute understanding of how the minds of other men (and indeed women) work. Whether he learned to ignore his conscience through his early experiences as a boy or acted out of genetic instinct is a matter of conjecture but what emerges from his story is a man who progressed from street urchin to a man – devoid of conscience – more powerful than kings and governments many of whom sought his advice as a matter of great import but would later distance themselves or simply deny any connection with the man. I have also read The Magic of Merlin (a critical study of Lloyd George) by Donald McCormick in attempts to learn more about Zaharoff with whom Lloyd George was inextricably and fatally (for the Liberal Tory coalition of the early 1920′s) linked. Interestingly neither myself nor Donald McCormick can find, in all the books written about Lloyd George, any reference to Zaharoff whatsoever though they were known close associates. After the First World War any connection with the name Zaharoff would have been poison to any political career, given his relentless pursuit of wealth through arms dealing and the mysterious affair of the Briey/Thionville munitions factories on the German French border in WW1. Lloyd George and Zaharoff himself (through his destruction of a complete and comprehensive personal diary of his life and many many official records) it seems would prefer that the name of Zaharoff and his deeds be obliterated from history. Intriguing stuff, all the more so because history has lost along with these records one of the most important lessons that mankind could ever learn.
I refer to the previous entry by Diane Clark respectfully as the only person I know of with any connection to the man, I would be absolutely fascinated to know what is contained in the letters from your Grandfather to Zaharoff.
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