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The Robber Barons The robber barons In a classic, The“ Age of Uncertainty”, the author, late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, writes on the robber buyers. “We turn now to how the rich were singled out for their success. It brings us inevitably to the railroads. Nothing in the last century, and nothing so far in this century, so altered the fortunes of so many people so suddenly as the American or Canadian railroad. The contractors who built it, those whose real estate was in its path, those who owned it, those who shipped by it and those who looted it could all get rich, some of them in a week. The only people connected with the railroads who were spared the burdens of wealth were those who laid the rails and ran the trains. Railroading in the last century was not a highly paid occupation, and it was also very dangerous. The casualty rates of those who ran the trains – the incidence of mutilation and death – approached that of a first-class war. The railroads got built. A great many honest men bent their efforts to their construction and operation; this should not be forgotten. But the business also attracted a legion of rascals. The latter were by far the best known, and they may well have been the most successful in enriching themselves. Spencer's natural selection operated excellently on behalf of scoundrels. Sometimes it tested one set against another. A railroad allowed for an interesting choice between two kinds of larceny-robbery of the customers and robbery of the stockholders. The most spectacular struggle occurred in the late eighteen-sixties between rival practitioners of these two basic arts. At issue was the Erie Railroad, running from the < ?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />New Jersey side of the Hudson River to Buffalo, in those days a deplorable and often lethal streak of rust. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who controlled the New York Central on the east margin of the river, wanted to own the Erie to ensure his monopoly of service to Buffalo and potentially to Chicago. Vanderbilt's commitment was to robbing the public. The enduring contribution of his family to spoken literature was the expression, “The public be damned.” One of his opponents was Jim Fisk, who died of gunshot wounds in 1872 at the rather early age of thirty-eight, and to the general regret of the better class of Americans who wished it had been earlier. Allied with him were Daniel Drew and Jay Gould, two other experienced larcenists, although Drew was by now a little past his best. Their commitment was to robbing the stockholders. Once an individual was in control of a railroad, there was a myriad of devices by which its cash and other assets could be siphoned off into his own pocket. Jay Gould was the acknowledged master of these techniques. Fisk, though not as highly qualified on detail, was far more colorful in the practice of fraud. www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 1 The robber barons Control was the key to both forms of larceny. The struggle for the railroad came in 1867 and brought the kind of collision that in those days more often occurred on the tracks of the Erie itself. Vanderbilt's advantage was money; he had this, and with it he could hope to buy a controlling interest in the stock. But Drew and Fisk had an even greater advantage. They were in control of the railroad; and they had a printing press in the basement of the building that housed the railroad offices. In consequence, they could print more stock than Vanderbilt could ever hope to buy and then enough more to ensure that they had the votes to keep themselves in power. This they proceeded to do. The strength of their position, it was said at the time, rested firmly on the freedom of the press. Vanderbilt turned to the courts. There initially he had an advantage; he was in personal possession of George Gardner Barnard of the New York State Supreme Court. Barnard, though not a great jurist, was frequently described as the best that money could buy. Vanderbilt had bought him. In return, Barnard enjoined the publishing activities of what was called the Erie Gang and threatened them with jail. They responded by picking up the books of the railroad, not forgetting its cash, and fleeing across the river to Jersey City. Jim Fisk, a sensitive man, also took his mistress, a less than virginal woman named Josie Mansfield. There was a thought that Vanderbilt's men might try to kidnap these refugees back across the Hudson to Judge Barnard's jurisdiction. Accordingly, a defense force was recruited from the railway yards, a flag was hung out and the new headquarters in Taylor's Hotel was named Fort Taylor. The Erie war, as by now it was being called, was full on. From Fort Taylor, Gould, Drew and Fisk counterattacked. In a breath-taking move they bought the New York State Legislature – or enough of it to have the stock they had printed made legal. Later they bought Judge Barnard away from Vanderbilt. More than money was involved; they also named a locomotive for him. And, a more important acquisition, they bought William Tweed, Boss Tweed, the head of Tammany Hall, and made him a director of the Erie. Vanderbilt now retreated. Peace, of a sort, broke out. Fisk was able to move the headquarters of the Erie back to New York and into the opera house, where he combined railroading with grand opera. His prospects seemed exceptional until he was shot by Edward Stokes. Stokes was a rival of Fisk for the love of Josie Mansfield, although, poor girl, it seems that she was more than willing to be nice to both. Fisk's body was brought back to Brattleboro, Vermont, whence he had launched his career, and the whole town turned out to give him a dead hero's welcome. He was buried there; four grieving maidens in stone still guard the burial plot. One of them seems to be pouring coins on his grave. www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 2 The robber barons The Public Reputation While the war for the Erie was at its height, the express from Buffalo one night was discovered, a little after the fact, to have lost four passenger cars on a curve. They had gone over a small precipice, and there was a painful fire when they landed. Coaches were of wood and heated by big potbellied coal stoves. Both the coaches and the passengers were a bad fire risk. A year or so later an engineer (engine driver to Englishmen) named James Griffin pulled his freight train into a siding to let the westbound passenger express go by. He dozed off, dreamed that the express had passed, then pulled out on the track and met the passenger train head-on. There was fire again; the casualties were again heavy. As an even more normal occurrence, Erie freight cars jumped the tracks or didn't move because there was no serviceable locomotive to pull them. Since the principal purpose of the management was the rape of the stockholders, there was also, not surprisingly, continuing and articulate complaint from this quarter. Many of the stockholders were English, and none got a dividend. All of these things, along with the fact that the men who worked on the road often went unpaid, gave Drew, Gould and Fisk a bad name. As noted, they are still referred to in the history books as the Erie Gang. The public reputation of their families, though somewhat redeemed in later times, has never been high. In contrast, the men who did in their customers fared far better in the public mind, and their families achieved high distinction. This was true of Vanderbilt. It was equally so in other fields of endeavor of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Guggenheim, Mellon, all of whom made their money by producing cheap, suppressing competition and selling dear. All founded dynasties of the highest repute. All eventually became names of the greatest respectability. The point is an interesting and perhaps predictable one. To mulct investors – other capitalists – left a nasty taste permanently in the public mouth. Public predation – the mulcting of the people at large — though criticized at the time, eventually acquired an aspect of high respectability, great social distinction. Even within their lifetimes many of its outstanding practitioners gained the reputation of being impeccably God-fearing men.” www.capitalideasonline.com Page - 3.
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