War as a profiteering racket

War as a profiteering racket is the novel’s recurring explanation for the gap between public ideals and private advantage. Its evidence accumulates across political slogans, corporate control of trade, financial power, and the experiences of soldiers and sailors: those asked to serve or sacrifice are not necessarily those who determine the purposes of war or benefit from its arrangements.

From reform to wartime service

The concept appears first as a shift in the language of reform. In the spring of 1917, a writer associated with The New Republic becomes unpopular where he earns his living as the magazine’s vocabulary turns against its earlier ideals. The substitutions are pointed: the New Freedom gives way to conscription, democracy to winning the war, and reform to safeguarding Morgan loans. Civilization, education, and service are redirected toward the purchase of a Liberty Bond. The sequence does not merely contrast lofty language with money; it shows political terms being refitted to make mobilization and financial protection sound like a common civic program.

The novel places this change beside a broader account of the United States’ expanding commitments. The line that the Allies borrowed $1.9 billion through the House of Morgan by 1917 is set against the claim that the country went overseas for democracy and the flag. By the end of the Peace Conference, the phrase J. P. Morgan suggests is associated with power over $74 billion. The contrast makes finance more than a beneficiary standing at the margins of war: it is a force whose influence reaches from loans to public policy, even as patriotic language gives intervention a different rationale.

Resources, monopolies, and distant fronts

The same argument travels beyond Europe. In an account of Cuba, Roosevelt’s appeal asks that amateur warriors be sent home while regular soldiers remain to do the dangerous work. The stated result of that work is to make Cuba secure for the Sugar Trust and National City Bank. Military service and the protection of commercial interests occupy the same sentence, exposing the distance between the people who perform the labor and the interests served by the outcome.

Aboard a United Fruit Company ship, Joe Williams encounters another version of that imbalance. The vessel waits outside Roseau in Dominica while limes are crated and loaded. A local older man explains to Joe and another quartermaster that the company’s monopoly lets it impose prices; if growers refuse them, their limes may be left to rot on the wharf. The conversation takes place after Joe and his shipmate have gone ashore, but its economic point is direct: control of transport and purchasing can determine whether producers receive value for their crop at all. The company’s power is visible not as an abstract statistic but as leverage over a perishable commodity and the people dependent on its sale.

The novel also follows the movement of ships through wartime waters. Joe’s later passage along the Spanish and French coasts unfolds amid lines of camouflaged freighters, returning transports, colliers, and hospital ships, with Allied battleships and destroyers patrolling offshore. The varied vessels carry different kinds of wartime traffic, but their movement forms a system in which trade and military protection share the sea. When the crew sees a red glare near Genoa, rumor turns it into an enemy capture; the light proves to come from a burning Standard Oil tanker outside the harbor. The scene links a corporate vessel to the hazards of wartime shipping without suggesting that the danger is borne equally by investors and crew.

Profits behind peace and relief

The critique persists after battlefield service and into the struggle over the postwar world. In Paris, the novel describes negotiators haggling over the price of blood, borders, and the political destiny of peoples while influential oil and resource interests quietly acquire raw materials. The arrangement makes the peace settlement look less like a clean break from wartime competition than a new arena in which access and control are bargained over. Relief maps and appeals to national destiny coexist with the material question of who will possess valuable resources.

That question becomes explicit in a conversation after the opera, when Standard Oil engineer Mr. Rasmussen discusses Baku, Mohommarah, and Mosul with J. W. Moorehouse. He worries that Anglo-Persian and Royal Dutch interests are gaining ground in the Near East and argues that the United States risks losing its primacy in world oil production. Armenia, meanwhile, is discussed as a possible mandate and as a place with starving people who may need feeding. The exchange lets humanitarian obligation and strategic competition occupy the same conversation. Relief may be necessary, yet oil interests and national advantage shape how powerful people talk about the region and its future.

The career of Paxton Hibben provides a related perspective on the consequences of that mismatch. In the famine, cholera, and typhus years, he goes to Moscow with a relief commission. Against the bargaining in Paris, the account sets order and work in Moscow. The contrast does not erase suffering; it shifts attention from diplomatic argument over territory and resources to the practical labor of relief. The novel’s recurring distinction is between public claims about peoples and the concrete work needed to sustain them.

The people who bear the cost

For the characters who encounter war directly, the language of profiteering often arrives through experience rather than policy. In Genoa, Dick Savage and Steve Warner meet an American sailor whose ship has brought mules. He speaks of the war as crooked and unfair to men like them, then throws his bottle against a stone lion. The act does not alter the machinery of war, but it gives a blunt physical form to the sailor’s rejection of a system he believes leaves ordinary men with the worst end of the bargain. The ancient monument remains in place; the gesture registers protest, not victory.

Dick carries that judgment into a letter to Hilda and Edwin Thurlow. He rejects the idea of a war to end war and argues that sending young men into combat undermines the principles their elders claim to defend. He calls the conflict a dirty goldbrick game promoted by governments and politicians for their own interests, while adding that censorship prevents him from describing what he has seen. His argument is sharpened by the distance between the home-front ideal and the soldier’s restricted account of the front. Even his ability to testify is constrained by wartime control of information.

Other wartime episodes reveal the uneven distribution of costs without making every character’s experience identical. Fred Summers calls the war a gigantic graft even as he takes Red Cross work in Paris, earning two salaries and receiving financial help from a French patron when Dick’s money runs out. The juxtaposition complicates any simple division between profiteer and victim: Fred is critical of the system but also improvises within it, while Dick’s depleted funds make the material consequences immediate. The scene gives the argument a social scale, from enormous loans and resource contests to the small sums that determine whether a volunteer can get by.

Meaning and limits of the critique

Across these episodes, profiteering is not presented as one secret plot with a single organizer. It is a pattern of connected advantages: loans tied to policy, monopolies able to dictate prices, companies and nations competing for resources, and public language that frames these interests as democracy, service, or relief. The novel’s examples range from Cuba and Dominica to the wartime sea routes, Paris, and the Near East, placing local labor and risk inside a wider circulation of capital and political power.

The counterpoint is the recurring presence of people who do the work or face the danger: soldiers in trenches, sailors on ships, workers and producers dependent on trade, and relief personnel responding to crises. Their protests and compromises do not resolve the imbalance. Instead, the contrast between their exposure and the influence of financiers, monopolies, and oil interests gives the concept its force. War as a profiteering racket names the novel’s persistent suspicion that patriotic purposes can coexist with private gain—and that the costs of that coexistence fall most heavily on those with the least control over its terms.