What "McTeague" Can Teach Us About Living Wisely
Progressive Era values have contributed to great American literature, but compassion and altruism have their limits.
The 1987 film Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone and starring Michael Douglas, is perhaps best known for the infamous line “greed is good.” Stone is an outspoken critic of capitalism’s excesses, and he clearly intended the line to be ironic rather than as a sincere endorsement of avarice. Nevertheless, it perfectly captured the sentiment of the 1980s, the “decade of greed.”
Frank Norris’s 1899 novel “McTeague: A Story of San Francisco” similarly reflects the anticapitalist spirit of its era, one defined by “trust busting” and a general suspicion of concentrated wealth and power. But whereas Wall Street glamorized its antihero Gordon Gekko, McTeague offers a gritty and uncompromising portrayal of how the pursuit of money warps and ultimately destroys its titular character.
McTeague, a miner turned dentist in turn-of-the-century San Francisco, falls for the young Trina, who is expecting to marry his friend Marcus. When Marcus graciously steps aside, McTeague and Trina wed. Their lives are upended however when Trina wins $5,000 in the lottery. The once-generous Marcus feels cheated of a rightful share, souring the friendship.
Trina grows increasingly miserly, refusing to touch the principal from her winnings and even hoarding the interest. Meanwhile, McTeague loses his dental practice for lacking proper credentials in the form of a degree from a dental college. As their love is soured by financial strain, the couple descends into poverty and constant bickering. In a grim finale, McTeague murders Trina for her $5,000 and flees, ultimately meeting his own dismal fate.
Norris clearly intends McTeague as a cautionary tale about the spiritual dangers of greed. Trina and McTeague’s refusal to share winnings with Marcus contributes to his vindictive campaign against them. Later, the desperate McTeague resorts to stealing from Trina’s treasured trunk of savings. When a destitute McTeague begs Trina for yet more money, she coldly refuses him, sealing her own fate. Greed, Norris suggests, breeds only treachery and strife.
But how well does this moral hold up under scrutiny? Are Trina’s supposed character flaws really so indefensible? After all, many of her “miserly” behaviors could be more charitably described as laudable thrift and financial prudence. In an era before social safety nets, her fanatical saving and frugal lifestyle are her main bulwark against the poorhouse. Even her “stinginess” towards Marcus and the down-and-out McTeague could be justified as setting boundaries against potential freeloaders.
If anything, Trina’s chief financial folly is not greed but the unproductive hoarding of her savings in a trunk. By failing to reinvest her accumulated interest, she squanders the opportunity to grow her principal balance and generate even more value for herself and society. Norris misses a chance to draw a meaningful distinction between pointless hoarding and constructive capital accumulation.
Indeed, Norris’s portrayal of greed often veers uncomfortably close to antisemitic stereotypes. The avaricious junk dealer Zerkov is a distasteful Jewish caricature, obsessed with ferreting out his wife Maria’s imagined stash of gold. Much like modern conspiracy theories involving the Rothschild banking dynasty, Norris portrays Zerkov as parasitic and money-grubbing, echoing the ugliest tropes about Jews.
Norris is on firmer ground in suggesting that base emotions like jealousy and pettiness often overwhelm our nobler instincts. Marcus cannot overcome his jealous resentment of McTeague’s financial good fortune. Later, the McTeagues’ destitution erodes their marital bonds. But these tragedies stem from universal human frailties, including envy and short-sightedness, not necessarily pursuing wealth. One could imagine similar occurrences of misfortune playing out in any number of different contexts.
Markets and financial institutions, by allowing us to interact at arm’s length, can help tame and channel humanity’s inherent pettiness. Norris, like many of his contemporaries, makes an error in romanticizing interpersonal bonds over impersonal exchange. The impermanence of most human relationships calls for a certain degree of emotional detachment and unsentimental cost-benefit calculation. Had McTeague maintained a keener eye on his financial interests from the start, say by investing in dental college in his youth, he might never have found himself in such dire straits.
Admittedly, an excessive focus on financial incentives can oftentimes lead one astray, morally and pragmatically. McTeague is right to trust his gut when it tells him to abandon a gold discovery near the end of the novel, because the police are hot on his trail. And one might rightly question whether Trina’s monomaniacal pursuit of savings is worth the sacrifice of life’s simple pleasures, like McTeague’s concertina playing or their elderly neighbor’s passion for book binding. It’s all a matter of tradeoffs and balance.
But contra Norris, the accumulation of wealth is not inherently suspect or ignoble. In fact, one might argue that by increasing overall social welfare, adding to one’s bottom line is actually more altruistic than pure interpersonal kindness. Acts of personal charity may foster bonds of reciprocal obligation, but careful investment and productive enterprise do more to lift up the anonymous masses.
With its vivid prose and penetrating insights into human nature, McTeague still makes for compelling reading well over a century after publication. As a product of the Progressive Era, however, the novel’s critique of market capitalism feels quaintly simplistic and morally blinkered. Trina’s miserliness may be unattractive and ultimately self-defeating, but her thrift and nose-to-the-grindstone work ethic are worthy of approbation, not scorn. Were we to embrace a culture of greater saving, investment and deferred gratification—and yes, perhaps a touch less sentimentality and performative altruism—we might actually forge a more prosperous and humane society. McTeague is a gripping read, but as a guide to human flourishing, it comes up rather short.
Excellent column on a talented, brief-lived novelist whose racism and antisemitism were vicious, even by fin-de-siècle standards. That’s important, because such views were central to the worldview of a large percentage of Progressives of that era. In my state, Virginia, for example, denying the vote to African Americans was considered to be a high-minded act of Progressive scientific governance—not the work of mouth-breathing Klansmen.
Also worth noting that the novel formed the basis of Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed”—a legendary 9-hour film of which no complete copies exist.
Reminds me of Francisco's money speech from Atlas Shrugged. A fortune will destroy someone who is not equal to it; i.e. a junkie or gambler or thief will quickly destroy the fortune and themselves. It isn't "money" that's to blame, but the character of the person. Someone once wrote, not sure whom, that they imagined that if all wealth were somehow magically divided among every adult and left alone in a free economy, by the end of the generation close to the same inequalities would exist for that reason. The productive and studious would invest and work hard, creating new fortunes, while the idle and irrational would quickly piss it away and return to poverty. It isn't "wealth" that makes great people, but virtue. And, when properly understood, wealth and virtue tend to go together.