Great Fortunes from Railroads

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These same manufacturers objected in the most indignant manner, as
they similarly do now, to any legislative investigations of their own
methods. Eager to have the practices of Vanderbilt and Gould probed
into, they were acrimoniously opposed to even criticism of their
factory system. For this extreme sensitiveness there was the amplest
reason. The cruelties of the factory system transcended belief. In,
for instance, the State of Massachusetts, vaunting itself for its
progressiveness, enlightenment and culture, the textile factories
were a horror beyond description. The Convention of the Boston Eight
Hour League, in 1872, did not overstate when it declared of the
factory system that "it employs tens of thousands of women and
children eleven and twelve hours a day; owns or controls in its own
selfish interest the pulpit and the press; prevents the operative
classes from making themselves felt in behalf of less hours, through
remorseless exercise of the power of discharge; and is rearing a
population of children and youth of sickly appearance and scanty or
utterly neglected schooling."...

As the factory system was in Massachusetts, so it was elsewhere. Any
employee venturing to agitate for better conditions was instantly
discharged; spies were at all times busy among the workers; and if a
labor union were formed, the factory owners would obtain sneak
emissaries into it, with orders to report on every move and disrupt
the union if possible. The factory capitalists in Massachusetts, New
York, Illinois and every other manufacturing State were determined to
keep up their system unchanged, because it was profitable to work
children eleven and a half hours a day in a temperature that in
summer often reached 108 degrees and in an atmosphere certain to
breed immorality; [Footnote: "Certain to breed immorality." See
report of Carrol D. Wright, Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of
Labor, 1881. A cotton mill operative testified: "Young girls from
fourteen and upward learn more wickedness in one year than they would
in five out of a mill." See also the numerous recent reports of the
National Child Labor Committee.] it was profitable to compel adult
men and women having families to work for an average of ninety cents
a day; it was profitable to avoid spending money in equipping their
factories with life-saving apparatus. Hence these factory owners,
forming the aristocracy of trade, savagely fought every move or law
that might expose or alter those conditions; the annals of
legislative proceedings are full of evidences of bribery.

Having no illusions, and being a severely practical man, Vanderbilt
well knew the pretensions of this trading class; with many a cynical
remark, aptly epitomizing the point, he often made sport of their
assumptions. He knew (and none knew better) that they had dived deep
in bribery and fraud; they were the fine gentlemen, he well recalled,
who had generally obtained patents by fraud; who had so often bribed
members of Congress to vote for a high tariff; the same, too, who had
bribed legislatures for charters, water rights, exemptions from
taxation, the right to work employees as long as, and under whatever
conditions, they wanted to. This manufacturing aristocracy professed
to look down upon Vanderbilt socially as a coarse sharper; and in New
York a certain ruling social element, the native aristocracy,
composed of old families whose wealth, originating in fraud, had
become respectable by age, took no pains to conceal their opinion of
him as a parvenu, and drew about their sacred persons an amusing
circle of exclusiveness into the rare precincts of which he might not
enter.

Vanderbilt now proceeded to buy social and religious grace as he had
bought laws. The purchase of absolution has ever been a convenient
and cheap method of obtaining society's condonation of theft. In
medieval centuries it took a religious form; it has become transposed
to a social traffic in these superior days. Let a man steal in
colossal ways and then surrender a small part of it in charitable,
religious and educational donations; he at once ceases being a thief
and straightway becomes a noble benefactor. Vanderbilt now shed his
life-long irreverence, and gave to Deems, a minister of the
Presbyterian Church, as a gift, the Church of the Strangers on Mercer
street, and he donated $1,000,000 for the founding of the Vanderbilt
University at Nashville, Tenn. The press, the church and the
educational world thereupon upon hailed him as a marvel of saintly
charity and liberality.

THE SERMONIZING OF THE "BEST CLASSES."

One section of the social organization declined to accept the views
of the class above it. This was the working class. Superimposed upon
the working class, draining the life blood of the workers to provide
them with wealth, luxuries and power, were those upper strata of
society known as the "best classes." These "best classes," with a
monstrous presumption, airily proclaimed their superiority and
incessantly harped upon the need of elevating and regenerating the
masses.

And who, it may be curiously asked, were the classes self destined or
self selected to do this regenerating? The commercial and financial
element, with its peculiar morals so adjusted to its interests, that
it saw nothing wrong in the conditions by which it reaped its wealth
--conditions that made slaves of the workers, threw them into
degradation and poverty, drove multitudes of girls and women into
prostitution, and made the industrial field an immense concourse of
tears, agony and carnage. Hanging on to this supreme class of wealth,
fawning to it, licking its very feet, were the parasites and
advocates of the press, law, politics, the pulpit, and, with a few
exceptions, of the professional occupations. These were the
instructors who were to teach the working class what morals were;
these were the eminences under whose guidance the working class was
to be uplifted!

Let us turn from this sickening picture of sordid arrogance and
ignorance so historically true of all aristocracies based upon money,
from the remotest time to this present day, and contemplate how the
organized part of the working class regarded the morals of its
"superiors."

While the commercial class, on the one hand, was determined on
beating down the working class at every point, it was, on the other,
unceasingly warring among itself. In business dealings there was no
such recognized thing as friendship. To get the better of the other
was held the quintessence of mercantile shrewdness. A flint-hard,
brute spirit enveloped all business transactions. The business man
who lost his fortune was generally looked upon without emotion or
pity, and condemned as an incapable. For self interest, business men
began to combine in corporations, but these were based purely upon
mercenary aims. Not a microscopic trace was visible of that spirit of
fellow kindness, sympathy, collective concern and brotherhood already
far developed among the organized part of the working class.

As the supereminent magnate of his day, Vanderbilt was invested with
extraordinary publicity; he was extensively interviewed and quoted;
his wars upon rival capitalists were matters of engrossing public
concern; his slightest illness was breathlessly followed by
commercialdom dom and its outcome awaited. Hosts of men, women and
children perished every year of disease contracted in factories,
mines and slums; but Vanderbilt's least ailment was given a
transcending importance, while the scourging sweep of death among the
lowly and helpless was utterly ignored.

Precisely as mercantile society bestowed no attention upon the
crushed and slain, except to advance roughshod over their stricken
bodies while throwing out a pittance in charity here and there, so
Vanderbilt embodied in himself the qualities that capitalist society
in mass practiced and glorified. "It was strong men," says Croffut,
"whom he liked and sympathized with, not weak ones; the self-reliant,
not the helpless. He felt that the solicitor of charity was always a
lazy or drunken person, trying to live by plundering the sober and
industrious." This malign distrust of fellow beings, this acrid
cynicism of motives, this extraordinary imputation of evil designs on
the part of the penniless, was characteristic of the capitalist class
as a whole. Itself practicing the lowest and most ignoble methods,
governed by the basest motives, plundering in every direction, it
viewed every member of its own class with suspicion and rapacity.
Then it turned about, and with immense airs of superiority,
attributed all of its own vices and crimes to the impoverished masses
which its own system had created, whether in America or elsewhere.

The apologist may hasten forward with the explanation that the
commercial class was not to be judged by Vanderbilt's methods and
qualities. In truth, however, Vanderbilt was not more inhuman than
many of the contemporary shining lights of the business world.

"HONESTY AND INDUSTRY" ANALYZED.

If there is any one fortune commonly praised as having been acquired
"by honesty and industry," it is the Borden millions, made from
cotton factories. At the time Vanderbilt was blackmailing, the
founder of this fortune, Colonel Borden, was running cotton mills in
Fall River. His factory operatives worked from five o'clock in the
morning to seven in the evening, with but two half hours of
intermission, one for breakfast, the other for dinner. The workday of
these men, women and children was thus thirteen hours; their wages
were wretchedly low, their life was one of actual slavery.
Insufficient nourishment, overwork, and the unsanitary and disgusting
conditions in the mills, prematurely aged and debilitated them, and
were a constant source of disease, killing off considerable numbers,
especially the children.

In 1850, the operatives asked Borden for better wages and shorter
hours. This was his reply: "I saw that mill built stone by stone; I
saw the pickers, the carding engines, the spinning mules and the
looms put into it, one after the other, and I would see every machine
and stone crumble and fall to the floor again before I would accede
to your wishes." Borden would not have been amiss had he added that
every stone in that mill was cemented with human blood. His
operatives went on a strike, stayed out ten months, suffered
frightful hardships, and then were forced back to their tasks by
hunger. Borden was inflexible, and so were all the other cotton mill
owners. [Footnote: The heroism of the cotton operatives was
extraordinary. Slaves themselves, they battled to exterminate negro
slavery. "The spinner's union," says McNeill, "was almost dead during
the [Civil] war, as most of its members had gone to shoulder the
musket and to fight... to strike the shackles from the negro. A large
number were slain in battle."-"The Labor Movement": 216-217.] It was
not until 1874, after many further bitterly-contested strikes, that
the Masachusetts Legislature was prevailed upon to pass a ten-hour
law, twenty-four years after the British Parliament had passed such
an enactment.

The commercial class, high and low, was impregnated with deceit and
dissimulation, cynicism, selfishness and cruelty. What were the
aspirations of the working class which it was to uplift? The contrast
stood out with stark distinctness. While business men were
frantically sapping the labor and life out of their workers, and then
tricking and cheating one another to seize the proceeds of that
exploitation, the labor unions were teaching the nobility of
brotherly cooperation. "Cultivate friendship among the great
brotherhood of toil," was the advice of Uriah Stevens, master workman
of the Knights of Labor, at the annual meeting of that organization
on January 12, 1871. And he went on:

And while the toiler is thus engaged in creating the world's value,
how fares his own interest and well-being? We answer, "Badly," for he
has too little time, and his faculties become too much blunted by
unremitting labor to analyze his condition or devise and perfect
financial schemes or reformatory measures. The hours of labor are too
long, and should be shortened. I recommend a universal movement to
cease work at five o'clock Saturday afternoon, as a beginning. There
should be a greater participation in the profits of labor by the
industrious and intelligent laborer. In the present arrangements of
labor and capital, the condition of the employee is simply that of
wage slavery--capital dictating, labor submitting; capital superior,
labor inferior.

This is an artificial and man-created condition, not God's
arrangement and order; for it degrades man and ennobles mere pelf. It
demeans those who live by useful labor, and, in proportion, exalts
all those who eschew labor and live (no matter by what pretence or
respectable cheat--for cheat it is) without productive work.

LABOR'S PRINCIPLES IGNORED.

Such principles as these evoked so little attention that it is
impossible to find them recorded in most of the newspapers of the
time; and if mentioned it was merely as the object of venomous
attacks. In varying degrees, now in outright abuse and again in
sneering and ridicule, the working class was held up as an ignorant,
discontented, violent aggregation, led by dangerous agitators, and
arrogantly seeking to upset all business by seeking to dictate to
employers what wages and hours of labor should be.

And, after all, little it mattered to the capitalists what the
workers thought or said, so long as the machinery of government was
not in their hands. At about the very time Master Workman Stevens was
voicing the unrest of the laboring masses, and at the identical time
when the panic of 1873 saw several millions of men workless, thrown
upon soup kitchens and other forms of charity, and battered wantonly
by policemen's clubs when they attempted to hold mass meetings of
protest, an Iowa writer, D. C. Cloud, was issuing a work which showed
concretely how thoroughly Government was owned by the commercial and
financial classes. This work, obscurely published and now scarcely
known except to the patient delver, is nevertheless one of the few
serious books on prevailing conditions written at that time, and is
in marked contrast to the reams of printed nonsense then circulated.
Although Cloud was tinged greatly with the middle class point of
view, and did not see that all successful business was based upon
deceit and fraud, yet so far as his lights carried him, he wrote
trenchantly and fearlessly, embodying series after series of facts
exposing the existing system. He observed:

... A measure without any merit save to advance the interest of a
patentee, or contractor, or railroad company, will become a law,
while measures of interest to the whole people are suffered to
slumber, and die at the close of the session from sheer neglect. It
is known to Congressmen that these lobbyists are paid to influence
legislation by the parties interested, and that dishonest and corrupt
means are resorted to for the accomplishment of the object they have
undertaken ... Not one interest in the country nor all other
interests combined are as powerful as the railroad interest ... With
a network of roads throughout the country; with a large capital at
command; with an organization perfect in all its parts, controlled by
a few leading spirits like Scott, Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Tracy and a
dozen others, the whole strength and wealth of this corporate power
can be put into operation at any moment, and Congressmen are bought
and sold by it like any article of merchandise. [Footnote:
"Monopolies and the People:" 155-156.]

CHAPTER VI

THE ENTAILING OF THE VANDERBILT FORTUNE

The richer Commodore Vanderbilt grew, the more closely he clung to
his old habits of intense parsimony. Occasionally he might
ostentatiously give a large sum here or there for some religious or
philanthropic purpose, but his general undeviating course was a
consistent meanness. In him was united the petty bargaining traits of
the trading element and the lavish capacities for plundering of the
magnate class. While defrauding on a great scale, pocketing tens of
millions of dollars at a single raid, he would never for a moment
overlook the leakage of a few cents or dollars. His comprehensive
plans for self-aggrandizement were carried out in true piratical
style; his aims and demands were for no paltry prize, but for the
largest and richest booty. Yet so ingrained by long development was
his faculty of acquisition, that it far passed the line of a passion
and became a monomania.

VANDERBILT'S CHARACTERISTICS.

To such an extent did it corrode him that even when he could boast
his $100,000,000 he still persisted in haggling and huckstering over
every dollar, and in tricking his friends in the smallest and most
underhand ways. Friends in the true sense of the word he had none;
those who regarded themselves as such were of that thrifty, congealed
disposition swayed largely by calculation. But if they expected to
gain overmuch by their intimacy, they were generally vastly mistaken;
nearly always, on the contrary, they found themselves caught in some
unexpected snare, and riper in experience, but poorer in pocket, they
were glad to retire prudently to a safe distance from the old man's
contact. "Friends or foes," wrote an admirer immediately after his
death, "were pretty much on the same level in his estimation, and if
a friend undertook to get in his way he was obliged to look out for
himself."

On one occasion, it is related, when a candidate for a political
office solicited a contribution, Vanderbilt gave $100 for himself,
and an equal sum for a friend associated with him in the management
of the New York Central Railroad. A few days later Vanderbilt
informed this friend of the transaction, and made a demand for the
hundred dollars. The money was paid over. Not long after this, the
friend in question was likewise approached for a political
contribution, whereupon he handed out $100 for himself and the same
amount for Vanderbilt. On being told of his debt, Vanderbilt declined
to pay it, closing the matter abruptly with this laconic
pronunciamento, "When I give anything, I give it myself." At another
time Vanderbilt assured a friend that he would "carry" one thousand
shares of New York Central stock for him. The market price rose to
$115 a share and then dropped to $90. A little later, before setting
out to bribe an important bill through the Legislature--a bill that
Vanderbilt knew would greatly increase the value of the stock--the
old magnate went to the friend and represented that since the price
of the stock had fallen it would not be right to subject the friend
to a loss. Vanderbilt asked for the return of the stock and got it.
Once the bill became a law, the market price of the stock went up
tremendously, to the utter dismay of the confiding friend who saw a
profit of $80,000 thus slip out of his hands into Vanderbilt's.
[Footnote: These and similar anecdotes are to be found incidentally
mentioned in a two-page biography, very laudatory on the whole, in
the New York "Times," issue of January 5, 1877.]

In his personal expenses Vanderbilt usually begrudged what he looked
upon as superfluous expense. The plainest of black clothes he wore,
and he never countenanced jewelry. He scanned the table bill with a
hypercritical eye. Even the sheer necessities of his physical
condition could not induce him to pay out money for costly
prescriptions. A few days before his death his physician recommended
champagne for some internal trouble. "Champagne!" exclaimed
Vanderbilt with a reproachful look, "I can't afford champagne. A
bottle every morning! Oh, I guess sody water'll do!"

From all accounts it would seem that he diffused about him the same
forbidding environment in his own house. He is described as stern,
obstinate, masterful and miserly, domineering his household like a
tyrant, roaring with fiery anger whenever he was opposed, and flying
into fits of fury if his moods, designs and will were contested. His
wife bore him thirteen children, twelve of whom she had brought up to
maturity. A woman of almost rustic simplicity of mind and of habits,
she became obediently meek under the iron discipline he administered.
Croffut says of her that she was "acquiescent and patient under the
sway of his dominant will, and in the presence of his trying moods."
He goes on: "The fact that she lived harmoniously with such an
obstinate man bears strong testimony to her character." [Footnote:
"The Vanderbilts": 113.]

If we are to place credibility in current reports, she was forced
time and time again to undergo the most violent scenes in interceding
for one of their sons, Cornelius Jeremiah. For the nervous
disposition and general bad health of this son the father had not
much sympathy; but the inexcusable crime to him was that Cornelius
showed neither inclination nor capacity to engage in a business
career. If Cornelius had gambled on the stock exchange his father
would have set him down as an exceedingly enterprising, respectable
and promising man. But he preferred to gamble at cards. This
rebellious lack of interest in business, joined with dissipation, so
enraged the old man that he drove Cornelius from the house and only
allowed him access during nearly a score of years at such rare times
as the mother succeeded in her tears and pleadings. Worn out with her
long life of drudgery, Vanderbilt's wife died in 1868; about a year
later the old magnate eloped with a young cousin, Frank A. Crawford,
and returning from Canada, announced his marriage, to the unbounded
surprise and utter disfavor of his children.

THE OLD MAGNATE'S DEATH.

An end, however, was soon coming to his prolonged life. A few more
years of money heaping, and then, on May 10, 1876, he was taken
mortally ill. For eight months he lay in bed, his powerful vitality
making a vigorous battle for life; two physicians died while in the
course of attendance on him; it was not until the morning of January
4, 1877, that the final symptoms of approaching death came over him.
When this was seen the group about his bed emotionally sang: "Come,
Ye Sinners, Poor and Needy," "Nearer, My God, To Thee," and "Show Ye
Pity, Lord." He died with a conventional religious end of which the
world made much; all of the property sanctities and ceremonials were
duly observed; nothing was lacking in the piety of that affecting
deathbed scene. It furnished the text for many a sermon, but while
ministerial and journalistic attention was thus eulogistically
concentrated upon the loss of America's greatest capitalist, not a
reference was made in church or newspaper to the deaths every year of
a host of the lowly, slain in the industrial vortex by injury and
disease, and too often by suicide and starvation. Except among the
lowly themselves this slaughter passed unprotested and unnoticed.

Even as Vanderbilt lay moribund, speculation was busy as to the
disposition of his fortune. Who would inherit his aggregation of
wealth? The probating of his will soon disclosed that he had
virtually entailed it. About $90,000,000 was left to his eldest son,
William H., and one-half of the remaining $15,000,000 was bequeathed
to the chief heir's four sons. [Footnote: To Cornelius J. Vanderbilt,
the Commodore's "wayward" son, only the income derived from $200,000
was bequeathed, upon the condition that he should forfeit even this
legacy if he contested the will. Nevertheless, he brought a contest
suit. William H. Vanderbilt compromised the suit by giving to his
brother the income on $1,000,000. On April 2, 1882, Cornelius J.
Vanderbilt shot and killed himself. Croffut gives this highly
enlightening account of the compromising of the suit:

"At least two of the sisters had sympathized with 'Cornele's' suit,
and had given him aid and comfort, neither of them liking the
legatee, and one of them not having been for years on speaking terms
with him; but now, in addition to the bequests made to his sisters,
William H. voluntarily [sic] added $500,000 to each from his own
portion.

"He drove around one evening, and distributed this splendid largess
from his carriage, he himself carrying the bonds into each house in
his arms and delivering them to each sister in turn. The donation was
accompanied by two interesting incidents. In one case the husband
said, 'William, I've made a quick calculation here, and I find these
bonds don't amount to quite $500,000. They're $150 short, at the
price quoted today.' The donor smiled, and sat down and made out his
check for the sum to balance.

"In another case, a husband, after counting and receipting for the
$500,000, followed the generous visitor out of the door, and said,
'By the way, if you conclude to give the other sisters any more,
you'll see that we fare as well as any of them, won't you?' The donor
jumped into his carriage and drove off without replying, only saying,
with a laugh, to his companions, 'Well, what do you think o' that'"--
"The Vanderbilts": 151-152.] A few millions were distributed among
the founder's other surviving children, and some comparatively small
sums bequeathed to charitable and educational institutions. The
Vanderbilt dynasty had begun.

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