Page:Upbuilders by Lincoln Steffens.djvu/280



They play with others, and the family “stands well” both downtown and up, but there is more fear than affection in their social and financial reception. They are a family of individuals, and individuality is offensive not alone to organized labour; organized capital hates it, too. And the Spreckelses are capitalists.

Claus Spreckels, the sugar magnate, was the head of the family. A German peasant, he came to this country when he was about eighteen years old, with two German thalers in his pocket. But he had the capitalist’s instinct in his heart. After clerking one year in a grocery store, he bought the business — on credit; and he extended both. In a few years he sent home to the village next to his for the young girl who became the mother of his family.

The Spreckelses moved to California in 1856, opened a grocery store in San Francisco and extended the business. Seeing that there was money in beer, Claus Spreckels built a brewery. Seeing that there was money in sugar, he built a refinery. There were other refineries; Claus Spreckels beat his competitors, but when the American Sugar Refining Company came along and, buying them up, offered to buy him out or, as Labour says of “scabs,” “beat him up,” he fought. And he fought not only in self-defence