Great Fortunes from Railroads Part 15

The President of the United States lived in the subdued simplicity of the White House. But William H. Vanderbilt ate in a great, lofty dining room, twenty-six by thirty-seven feet, wrought in Italian Renaissance, with a wainscot of golden-hued, delicately-carved English oak around all four sides, and a ceiling with richly-painted hunting-scene panels. When he entertained it was in a vast drawing- room, palatially equipped, its walls hung with flowing ma.s.ses of pale red velvet, embroidered with foliage flowers and b.u.t.terflies, and set with crystals and precious stones.

It was his art gallery, however, which flattered him most. He knew nothing of art, and underneath his pretentions cared less, for he was a complete utilitarian; but it had become fashionable to have an elaborate art gallery, and he forthwith disbursed money right and left to a.s.semble an aggregation of paintings.

He gave orders to agents for their purchase with the same equanimity that he would contracts for railroad supplies. And, as a rule, the more generous in size the canva.s.ses, the more satisfied he was that he was getting his money's worth; art to him meant buying by the square foot. Not a few of the paintings unloaded upon him were, despite their high-sounding reputations, essentially commonplace subjects, and flashy and hackneyed in execution; but he gloried in the celebrity that came from the high prices he was decoyed into paying for them. For one of Meissionier's paintings, "The Arrival at the Chateau," he paid $40,000, and on one of his visits to Paris he enriched Meissionier to the extent of $188,000 for seven paintings.

Not until his corps of art advisers were satisfied that a painter became fashionably talked about, could Vanderbilt be prevailed upon to buy examples of his work. There was something intensely magical in the ease and cheapness with which he acquired the reputation of being a "connoisseur of art." Neither knowledge nor appreciation were required; with the expenditure of a few hundred thousand dollars he instantaneously transformed himself from a heavy-witted, uncultured money h.o.a.rder into the character of a surpa.s.sing "judge and patron of art." And his pretensions were seriously accepted by the uninformed, absorbing their opinions from the newspapers.

"THE PUBLIC BE d.a.m.nED."

If he had discreetly comported himself in other respects he might have pa.s.sed tolerably well as an extremely public-spirited and philanthropic man. After every great fraud that he put through he would usually throw out to the public some ostentatious gift or donation. This would furnish a new ground to the sycophantic chorus for extolling his fine qualities. But he happened to inherit his father's irascibility and extreme contempt for the public whom he exploited. Unfortunately for him, he let out on one memorable occasion his real sentiments. Asked by a reporter why he did not consider public convenience in the running of his trains, he blurted out, "The public be d.a.m.ned!"

It was a.s.suredly a superfluous question and answer; but expressed so sententiously, and published, as it was, throughout the length and breadth of the land, it excited deep popular resentment. He was made the target for general denunciation and execration, although unreasonably so, for he had but given candid and succinct utterance to the actuating principle of the whole capitalist cla.s.s. The moral of this incident impressed itself sharply upon the minds of the masterly rich, and to this day has greatly contributed to the politic manner of their exterior conduct. They learned that however in private they might safely sneer at the ma.s.s of the people as created for their manipulation and enrichment, they must not declare so publicly. Far wiser is it, they have come to understand, to confine spoliation to action, while in outward speech affirming the most mellifluous and touching professions of solicitude for public interests.

ADDS $100,000,000 IN SEVEN YEARS.

But William H. Vanderbilt was little affected by this outburst of public rage. He could well afford to smile cynically at it, so long as no definite move was taken to interfere with his privileges, power and possessions. Since his father's death he had added fully $100,000,000 to his wealth, all within a short period. It had taken Commodore Vanderbilt more than thirty years to establish the fortune of $105,000,000 he left. With a greater population and greater resources to prey upon, William H. Vanderbilt almost doubled the amount in seven years. In January, 1883, he confided to a friend that he was worth $194,000,000. "I am the richest man in the world," he went on. "In England the Duke of Westminster is said to be worth $200,000,000, but it is mostly in land and houses and does not pay two per cent." [Footnote: Related in the New York "Times," issue of December 9, 1885.] In the same breath that he boasted of his wealth he would bewail the ill-health condemning him to be a victim of insomnia and indigestion.

Having a clear income of $10,350,000 a year, he kept his ordinary expenses down to $200,000 a year. Whatever an air of indifference he would a.s.sume in his grandee role of "art collector," yet in most other matters he was inveterately closefisted. He had a delusion that "everybody in the world was ready to take advantage of him," and he regarded "men and women, as a rule, as a pretty bad lot." [Footnote: "The Vanderbilts": 127.] This incident--one of many similar incidents narrated by Croffut--reveals his microscopic vigilance in detecting impositions: When in active control of affairs at the office he followed the unwholesome habit of eating the midday lunch at his desk, the waiter bringing it in from a neighboring restaurant.

He paid his bill for this weekly, and he always scrutinized the items with proper care. "Was I here last Thursday?" he asked of a clerk at an adjoining desk.

"No, Mr. Vanderbilt; you stayed at home that day."

"So I thought," he said, and struck that day from the bill. Another time he would exclaim, sotto voce, "I didn't order coffee last Tuesday," and that item would vanish.

Up to the very last second of his life his mind was filled with a whirl of business schemes; it was while discussing railroad plans with Robert Garrett in his mansion, on December 8, 1885, that he suddenly shot forward from his chair and fell apoplectically to the floor, and in a twinkling was dead. Servants ran to and fro excitedly; messengers were dispatched to summon his sons; telegrams flashed the intelligence far and wide.

The pa.s.sing away of the greatest of men could not have received a t.i.the of the excitement and attention caused by William H.

Vanderbilt's death. The newspaper offices hotly issued page after page of description, not without sufficient reason. For he, although unt.i.tled and vested with no official power, was in actuality an autocrat; dictatorship by money bags was an established fact; and while the man died, his corporate wealth, the real director and center, to a large extent, of government functions, survived unimpaired.

He had abundantly proved his autocracy. Law after law had he violated; like his father he had corrupted and intimidated, had bought laws, ignored such as were unsuited to his interests, and had decreed his own rules and codes. Progressively bolder had the money kings become in coming out into the open in the directing of Government. Long had they prudently skulked behind forms, devices and shams; they had operated secretly through tools in office, while virtuously disclaiming any insidious connection with politics. But no observer took this pretence seriously. James Bryce, fresh from England, delving into the complexities and incongruities of American politics at about this time, wrote that "these railway kings are among the greatest men, perhaps I may say, the greatest men in America," which term, "greatest," was a ludicrously reverent way of describing their qualities. "They have power," he goes on in the same work, "more power--that is, more opportunity to make their will prevail, than perhaps any one in political life except the President or the Speaker, who, after all, hold theirs only for four years and two years, while the railroad monarch holds his for life." [Footnote: "The American Commonwealth." First Ed.: 515.] Bryce was not well enough acquainted with the windings and depths of American political workings to know that the money kings had more power than President or Speaker, not nominally, but essentially. He further relates how when a railroad magnate traveled, his journey was like a royal progress; Governors of States and Territories bowed before him; Legislatures received him in solemn session; cities and towns sought to propitiate him, for had he not the means of making or marring a city's fortunes? "You cannot turn in any direction in American politics," wrote Richard T. Ely a little later, "without discovering the railway power. It is the power behind the throne. It is a correct popular instinct which designates the leading men in the railways, railroad magnates or kings. ... Its power ramifies in every direction, its roots reaching counting rooms, editorial sanctums, schools and churches which it supports with a part of its revenues, as well as courts and Legislatures." ... [Footnote: "The Independent," issue of August 28, 1890.]

HIS DEATH A NOTABLE EVENT.

Vanderbilt's death, as that of one of the real monarchs of the day, was an event of transcendent importance, and was treated so. The vocabulary was ransacked to find adjectives glowing enough to describe his enterprise, foresight, sagacity and integrity. Much elaborated upon was the fiction that he had increased his fortune by honest, legitimate means--a fiction still disseminated by those shallow or mercenary writers whose trade is to spread orthodox belief in existing conditions. The underlying facts of his career and methods were purposely suppressed, and a nauseating sort of panegyric subst.i.tuted. Who did not know that he had bribed Legislature after Legislature, and had constantly resorted to conspiracy and fraud? Not one of his eulogists was innocent of this knowledge; the record of it was too public and palpable to justify doubts of its truth. The extent of his possessions and the size of his fortune aroused wonderment, but no effort was made to contrast the immense wealth bequeathed by one man with the dire poverty on every hand, nor to connect those two conditions.

At the very time his wealth was being inventoried at $200,000,000, not less than a million wage earners were out of employment, [Footnote: "It is probably true," said Carroll D. Wright in the United States Labor Report for 1886, "that this total (in round numbers 1,000,000) as representing the unemployed at any one time in the United States, is fairly representative."] while the millions at work received the scantiest wages. Nearly three millions of people had been completely pauperized, and, in one way or another, had to be supported at public expense. Once in a rare while, some perceptive and unshackled public official might pierce the sophistries of the day and reveal the cause of this widespread poverty, as Ira Steward did in the fourth annual report of the Ma.s.sachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor for 1873.

"It is the enormous profits," he pointedly wrote, "made directly upon the labor of the wage cla.s.ses, and indirectly through the results of their labor, that, first, keeps them poor, and, second, furnishes the capital that is finally loaned back to them again" at high rates of interest. Unquestionably sound and true was this explanation, yet of what avail was it if the causes of their poverty were withheld from the active knowledge of the ma.s.s of the wage workers? It was the special business of the newspapers, the magazines, the pulpit and the politicians to ignore, suppress or twist every particle of information that might enlighten or arouse the ma.s.s of people; if these agencies were so obtuse or recalcitrant as not to know their expected place and duty at critical times, they were quickly reminded of them by the propertied cla.s.ses. To any newspaper owner, clergyman or politician showing a tendency to radicalism, the punishment came quickly. The newspaper owner was deprived of advertis.e.m.e.nts and accommodations, the clergyman was insidiously hounded out of his pulpit by his own church a.s.sociations, the funds of which came from men of wealth, and the politician was ridiculed and was summarily retired to private life by corrupt means. As for genuinely honest administrative officials (as distinguished from the _apparently_ honest) who exposed prevalent conditions and sought to remedy them in their particular departments, they were eventually got rid of by a similar campaign of calumny and corrupt influences.

HIS FRAUDS IN EVADING TAXES.

As in the larger sense all criticism of conditions was systematically smothered, so were details of the methods of the rich carefully obscured or altogether pa.s.sed by in silence. At Vanderbilt's death the newspapers laved in gorgeous descriptions of his mansion. Yet apart from the proceeds of his great frauds, the amounts out of which he had cheated the city and State in taxation were alone much more than enough to have paid for his splendor of living. Like the Astors, the Goelets, Marshall Field and every other millionaire without exception, he continuously defrauded in taxes.

We have seen how the Vanderbilts seized hold of tens of millions of dollars of bonds by fraud. Certain of their railroad stocks were exempted from individual taxation, but railroad bonds ranked as taxable personal property. Year after year William H. Vanderbilt had perjured himself in swearing that his personal property did not exceed $500,000. On more than this amount he would not pay. When at his death his will revealed to the public the proportions of his estate, the New York City Commissioners of a.s.sessments and Taxes made an apparent effort to collect some of the millions of dollars out of which he had cheated the city. It was now that the obsequious and time-serving Depew, grown gray and wrinkled in the retainership of the Vanderbilt generations, came forward with this threat: "He informed us," testified Michael Coleman, president of the commission, "that if we attempted to press too hard he would take proceedings by which most of the securities would be placed beyond our reach so that we could not tax them. The Vanderbilt family could convert everything they had into non-taxable securities, such as New York Central, Government and city bonds, Delaware and Lackawanna, and Delaware and Western Railroad stocks, and pay not a dollar provided they wished to do so." [Footnote: The New York Senate Committee on Cities, 1890, iii: 2355-2356.]

The Vanderbilt estate compromised by paying the city a mere part of the sum owed. It succeeded in keeping the greatest part of its possessions immune from taxation, in doing which it but did what the whole of the large propertied cla.s.s was doing, as was disclosed in further detailed testimony before the New York Senate Committee on Cities in 1890.

HIS WILL TRANSMITS $200,000,000.

Unlike his father, William H. Vanderbilt did not bequeath the major portion of his fortune to one son. He left $50,000,000 equally to each of his two sons, Cornelius and William K. Vanderbilt.

Supplementing the fortunes they already had, these legacies swelled their individual fortunes to approximately $100,000,000 each--about the same amount as their father had himself inherited. The remaining $100,000,000 was thus disposed of in William H. Vanderbilt's will: $40,000,000, in railroad and other securities, was set apart as a trust fund, the income of which was to be apportioned equally among each of his eight children. This provided them each with an annual income of $500,000. In turn, the princ.i.p.al was to descend to their children, as they should direct by will. Another $40,000,000 was shared outright among his eight children. The remaining $20,000,000 was variously divided: the greater part to his widow; $2,000,000 as an additional gift to Cornelius; $1,000,000 to a favorite grandson; sundry items to other relatives and friends, and about $1,000,000 to charitable and public inst.i.tutions.

He was buried in a mausoleum costing $300,000, which he himself had ordered to be built at New Dorp, Staten Island; and there to-day his ashes lie, splendidly interred, while millions of the living plundered and disinherited are suffered to live in the deadly congestion of miserable habitations.

CHAPTER VII

THE VANDERBILT FORTUNE IN THE PRESENT GENERATION

With the demise of William H. Vanderbilt the Vanderbilt fortune ceased being a one-man factor. Although apportioned among the eight children, the two who inherited by far the greater part of it-- Cornelius and William K. Vanderbilt--were its rulers paramount. To them descended the sway of the extensive railroad systems appropriated by their grandfather and father, with all of the allied and collateral properties. Both of these heirs had been put through a punctilious course of training in the management of railroad affairs; all of the subtle arts and intricacies of finance, and the grand tactical and strategic strokes of railroad manipulation, had been drilled into them with extraordinary care.

Their first move upon coming into their inheritance was to surround themselves with the magnificence of imposing residences, as befitted their state and estate. A signatory stroke of the pen was the only exertion required of them; thereupon architects and a host of artisans yielded service and built palaces for them, for the one at Fifth avenue and Fifty-second street, for the other at Fifth avenue and Fifty-seventh street.

Millions were spent with prodigal lavishness. On his Fifth avenue mansion alone, Cornelius expended $5,000,000. To get the s.p.a.ce for three beds of blossoms and a few square yards of turf, a brownstone house adjoining his mansion was torn down, and the garden created at an expense of $400,000. George, a brother of Cornelius and of William K. Vanderbilt, and a man of retiring disposition, spent $6,000,000 in building a palatial home in the heart of the North Carolina mountains. For three years three hundred stonemasons were kept busy; and he gradually added land to his surrounding estate until it embraced one hundred and eighty square miles. His game preserves were enlarged until they covered 20,000 acres. So, within thirty years from the time their grandfather, Commodore Vanderbilt, was extorting his original millions by blackmailing, did they live like princes, and in greater luxury and power than perhaps any of the t.i.tular princes of ancient or modern days. But the splendor of these abodes was intended merely for partial use. At their command s.p.a.cious, majestic palaces arose at Newport, whither in the torrid season some of the Vanderbilts transferred their august seat of power and pleasure.

Hardly had they settled themselves down in the vested security of their great fortunes when an ominous situation presented itself to shake the entire propertied cla.s.s into a violent state of uneasiness.

Hitherto the main antagonistic movement perturbing the magnates was that of the obstreperous and still powerful middle cla.s.s. Dazed and enraged at the certain prospect of their complete subjugation and eventual annihilation, these small capitalists had clamored for laws restricting the power of the great capitalists. Some of their demands were constantly being enacted into law, without, however, the expected results.

THE GREAT LABOR MOVEMENT OF 1886

Now, to the intense alarm of all sections of the capitalist cla.s.s, a very different quality of movement reared itself upward from the deeps of the social formation. [Footnote: It may be asked why an extended description of this movement is interposed here. Because, inasmuch as it is a part of the plan of this work to present a constant succession of contrasts, this is, perhaps, as appropriate a place as any to give an account of the highly important labor movement of 1886. Of course, it will be understood that this movement was not the result of any one capitalist fortune or process, but was a general revolt to compel all forms of capitalist control to concede better conditions to the workers.]

This time it was the laboring ma.s.ses preparing for the most vigorous and comprehensive attack that they had ever made upon capitalism's intrenchments. Long exploited, oppressed and betrayed, starved or clubbed into intervals of apathy or submission, they were again in motion, moving forward with a set deliberation and determination which disconcerted the capitalist cla.s.s. No mere local conflict of cla.s.s interests was it on this occasion, but a general cohesive revolt of the workers against some of the conditions and laws under which they had to labor.

In 1884 the Federation of Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada had issued a manifesto calling upon all trades to unite in the demand for an eight-hour workday. The date for a general strike was finally fixed for May 1, 1886. The year 1886, therefore, was one of general agitation throughout the United States. With rapidity and enthusiasm the movement spread. Presently it took on a radical character. Realizing it to be at basis the first national awakening of the proletariat, progressive men and women of every shade of opinion hastened forward to support it and direct it into one of opposition, not merely to a few of the evils of wage slavery, but to what they considered the fundamental cause itself--the capitalist system.

The propertied cla.s.ses were not deceived. They knew that while this labor movement nominally confined itself to one for a shorter workday, yet its impetus was such that it contained the fullest potentialities for developing into a mighty uprising against the very system by which they were enabled to enrich themselves and enslave the ma.s.ses.

The moment this fact was discerned, both great and small capitalists instinctively suspended hostilities. They tacitly agreed to hold their bitter warfare for supremacy in abeyance, and unite in the face of their common danger. The triangular conflict between the large and small capitalists and the trades unions now resolved into a duel between the propertied cla.s.ses of all descriptions on the one hand, and, on the other, the workingmen's organizations. The Farmers'

Alliance, essentially a middle-cla.s.s movement of the employing farmers in the South and West, was counted upon as aligned with the propertied cla.s.ses. On the part of the capitalists there was no unity of organization in the sense of selected leaders or committees. It was not necessary. A stronger bond than that of formal organization drove them into acting in conscious unison--namely, the immediate peril involved to their property interests. Apprehension soon gave way to grim decision. This formidable labor movement had to be broken and dispersed at any cost.

But how was the work of destruction to be done? This was the predicament. Vested wealth could succeed in bribing a labor leader here and there; but the movement had bounded far beyond the elemental stage, and had become a glowing agitation which no traitor or set of traitors could have stopped.

One effective way of discrediting and suppressing it there was; the ancient one of virtually outlawing it, and throwing against it the whole brute force of Government. The task of putting it down was preeminently one for the police, army and judiciary. They had been used to stifle many another protest of the workers; why not this? As the great labor movement rolled on, enlisting the ardent attachment of the ma.s.ses, denouncing the injustices, corruption and robberies of the existing industrial system, the propertied cla.s.ses more acutely understood that they must hasten to stamp it out by whatever means.

The munic.i.p.al and State governments and the National Government, completely representing their interests and ideas, and dominated by them, stood ready to use force. But there had to be some kind of pretext. The hosts of labor were acting peacefully and with remarkable self control and discipline.

THE PROPERTIED CLa.s.sES STRIKE BACK.