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The Law of Financial Success

The 1920s in Chicago were a brutal arithmetic of hope and hunger. The city pulsed with the Roaring Twenties myth—jazz spilling from speakeasies, skyscrapers clawing at the sky, Model Ts choking the streets—but for most men, the decade was a slow grinding down. The stockyards stank of blood and offal, factories chewed through limbs and lungs, and the Loop's employment agencies handed out day-labor slips like scraps to dogs. Prohibition turned corner saloons into armed camps, bootlegging offered quick money and quicker funerals, and the stock market dangled the promise of easy riches before men who could barely afford a nickel streetcar ride. In this world, "getting ahead of the game" wasn't ambition; it was survival sharpened to a razor.

Thousands of these men—ex-doughboys with shell shock, fresh-off-the-boat Poles and Italians, Black migrants fleeing Southern lynch law, hobos riding the rails into Union Station—lived in what the sociologists called Hobohemia. West Madison Street, the Main Stem, was its artery: blocks of flophouses charging twenty-five cents for a cot in a room that stank of sweat and carbolic soap, employment sharks charging a dime for a job lead that might last one shift, saloons where a bucket of suds cost a nickel and a brawl was free. Men slept in doorways when the flophouse money ran out, wrapped in newspapers against the lake wind that cut through threadbare coats. Lice crawled in seams, tuberculosis coughed blood onto pillows, and the police rousted anyone who looked too comfortable on a bench. A dollar a day kept body and soul together if you were lucky; many didn't.

In the midst of this, a small bookshop operated at 1353 North Clark Street, just far enough from the Gold Coast's mansions to carry the name ironically. The Gold Coast Book Store was run by Arthur Desmond, a radical exile who had fled New Zealand and various indictments for publishing seditious material. Desmond's shelves held anarchist pamphlets, socialist tracts, occult treatises, and whatever else might sell to men whose aspirations had been beaten flat but not quite killed. Among the dog-eared volumes was a slim 1907 paperback titled "The Law of Financial Success" by Edward E. Beals, published originally by Chicago's own Fiduciary Press. It cost pennies in Desmond's shop—sometimes thrown in with a purchase of more incendiary reading—and it promised something the stockyards and employment lines never did: a system, a law, a way to bend the world so money came to you instead of running the other way.

Beals's book was New Thought distilled into blunt prose. Its core message was simple and merciless: financial success was not luck or inheritance or even hard work alone. It was a mental law, as inexorable as gravity. Desire wealth intensely enough, hold the mental picture of it clearly, banish doubt and fear, and the universe would respond. Ambition was holy; poverty was a sin of thought. "If you are unsuccessful, and money seems not to be attracted by or to you," Beals wrote, "this book will guide your thought and actions into proper channels." The chapters marched through the principles: cultivating faith in abundance, mastering the power of suggestion, aligning desire with will, and—most seductive—visualizing yourself already rich. No need for capital, connections, or luck. Just the right mindset, repeated like a prayer.

Men bought it because they were drowning and it offered a rope. Take Mike Kowalski, a stockyard laborer who had come from Krakow in 1913. By 1925 he was thirty-two, married with three kids in a two-room flat on Ashland Avenue, working twelve-hour shifts splitting hog carcasses for eighteen dollars a week. The pay barely covered rent and beans; the kids went barefoot in summer and coughed all winter. Mike had tried everything legitimate: overtime when it existed, odd jobs on Sunday, even a short stint running numbers for a North Side outfit until a raid scared him straight. One night in 1926, after a foreman cut his hours, he wandered into Desmond's shop to escape the cold and bought "The Law of Financial Success" for a dime. He read it by the light of a kerosene lamp while his wife slept, mouthing the affirmations under his breath: "I am a magnet for money. Wealth flows to me in avalanches of abundance."

For weeks he tried. He pictured a bankbook with four figures, a house with a yard, his kids in clean clothes. He spoke positively, refused to complain about the job, even smiled at the foreman who hated him. But the yards didn't care about his mental attitude. A slowdown hit; hours were cut again. The affirmations felt hollow when the landlord knocked and the kids cried from hunger. Mike kept the book hidden under the mattress, ashamed to throw it out, ashamed to admit it hadn't worked. He never told his wife he spent the dime. Eventually he sold it back to Desmond for five cents to buy bread.

Or consider James "Jimmy" Carter, a Black veteran who had fought in France with the 369th Infantry and returned to Chicago in 1919 only to find the race riots waiting. By 1927 he was thirty, living in a rented room on the South Side, working as a Pullman porter when the trains ran, nothing when they didn't. He had seen white men get rich in the war boom while he dodged bricks thrown through windows. Jimmy found the book in a secondhand pile at the Gold Coast Book Store during a layover downtown. The cover was worn, the pages yellow, but the promises burned. He read it on the train, under the dim coach lights, memorizing passages about "the creative power of thought." He started small: affirming a promotion, visualizing tips pouring in. For a month it seemed to work—extra runs, better passengers, a few extra dollars. Then the company cut porter positions. Jimmy was bumped back to irregular shifts. The affirmations turned bitter in his mouth. He kept the book anyway, carrying it in his grip like a talisman against despair.

Not every story ended in defeat. Some men used the book's ideas as a crude form of self-discipline. A young Italian named Tony Russo, twenty-four and fresh from Naples, worked as a fruit peddler on Maxwell Street. He bought the book in 1928 after hearing a hobo preach its gospel in a soup line. Tony couldn't read English well, so he paid a neighbor to translate the key parts. He focused on one principle: persistent desire backed by action. He began rising at four to buy produce cheaper at the market, pushed his cart farther each day, spoke politely to every customer, and saved every penny. The mental exercises kept him from drinking away his earnings or fighting with competitors. By 1929 he had saved enough for a second cart and hired a cousin. It wasn't riches, but it was ahead of the game compared to the men still sleeping in the flophouses.

Most, though, found the law wanting. The book assumed a world where effort met opportunity halfway. In 1920s Chicago, opportunity was rationed by color, accent, union card, and who you knew in City Hall. The stock market crash of 1929 would later expose the fragility of mental magic when banks failed and breadlines stretched for blocks. Men who had visualized wealth found themselves selling apples on corners or riding boxcars out of town.

Yet the book's appeal endured because it offered the one thing reality refused: control. In a city where a foreman could fire you for looking tired, where a boll weevil in Alabama could drive you north to starve, where a bullet from a rival bootlegger could end you overnight, "The Law of Financial Success" whispered that the fault lay not in the system but in your thoughts. Change your mind, and the world changes. It was a cruel comfort, but comfort nonetheless.

In the end, the men who haunted Desmond's shop and clutched Beals's little volume were not fools. They were simply doing what desperate men have always done: grasping for any lever that might lift them out of the pit. The Gold Coast Book Store, with its mismatched name and radical shelves, was one of the few places that didn't mock them for trying. The book itself was a mirror—reflecting back the dream of a fairer game, even as the real one ground on without mercy. For a dime or a nickel, it sold hope in a city that sold everything else cheap. And in Hobohemia, hope was the most expensive thing of all.