However much the amputation hurt, death by slow bleeding would have hurt worse. The savings in outlay did help to slow the rising tide of costs. The lump-sale sum helped to settle the most urgent of outstanding bills. But the recent, westward warehouse expansions still left the coffers cash-poor. The collapse of a good deal of commercial paper the firm was holding only exacerbated the need for real money.
Chance floated Clare a deliverance in the form of George Gifford, the Chicago grain speculator. Gifford had started life as a wheat farmer near Rockford, Illinois. When the railroad reached his land in 1852, opening its artificial corridor between city and hinterland, Gifford’s existence altered utterly and irrevocably.
Rail steadied the farmer’s year like a hand laid upon the turbulent heel of heaven. It standardized by fiat, without recourse to Congress, the countless different times the nation had run on. Until the train, harvest had been a wild, speculative ride in a wagon full of sprouting and rotting grain. More than once, young Gifford sold his year’s labor for what could only generously be called nothing. Rail opened up a perpetual grain auction only a few hours away, and tied Gifford to it.
The train passed over Gifford’s Illinois like the wave of some magic wand. New towns leaped up before it, sprung out of fields like pheasants flushed out by dogs. The Galena and Chicago Union baled Gifford’s fate and bound him to the West’s metropolis. Granted, Chicago paid the lowest prices on grain in creation. But at least it always paid, and in coin, not rotting promises.
Field and city fed off one another. Overnight, lakeside swamp and wild prairie turned each other into a peopled garden. Nature grew benevolent, hitched to this regulating plow. Gifford fell in love with the city now erupting from the grasslands that it had transformed. In such a place, one could do the earth’s business, and more.
Gifford watched his life’s capital flow through the Chicago grain market. He lived and died by that auction’s smallest ripple. After the war, one of those glaringly self-evident inventions came along to transform the way that human beings organized their fate in this world. To Gifford, the new grain elevators were nothing less than giant dams that gathered the West’s trickles of grain into a torrent large enough to drive the mill wheel of eternal prosperity.
In the space of a few years, Gifford watched these wood and iron hulks turn a wasteful trade in discrete seed into continuous traffic in abstraction. Corn was no longer a mere cereal but liquid cash: the silver certificate of the vegetative kingdom. Wheat was not bread alone but freely tradable chits, swapped a dozen times even before the kernels were stored.
The cut of rail through the state touched off a fever of land speculation. Mechanical reapers fed like locusts upon the newly subdued plots, extracting ever-greater yields from the rehabilitated wastes that could now be brought to market down to the last nib. Gifford’s suddenly well-placed farm tripled its value in less than seven months. Smelling his future, he auctioned off the titles to his fields and headed toward cash’s new Capitol.
Gifford bought into an elevator being constructed on the happy confluence of railhead and Chicago River. He jointly operated a monstrous grain ship five stories tall: fifty bins swallowing a third of a million bushels. And from his perch high up in the lucrative aerie, George Gifford began to cast his eye downtown, upon the Exchange Hall, the new digs of the infant Chicago Board of Trade.
At the Board of Trade, crops dissolved into the idea of produce. The Exchange promoted grain to pure exchangeability. On the trading floor, a man could buy and sell not only the amber waves themselves but also another man’s ability to deliver the sheaves at some date in the now-specified future.
Gifford pushed the shape of that abstracting process to its logical extreme. ’Change did not trade in the thing so much as in the thing’s price. Gifford merely extended that derivative. He decided that there must be a way to trade in the price of price itself. And in 1868, he staked his warehouseman’s small fortune on finding it.
Early in that year, a messenger approached Gifford about joining an experiment in adolescent capitalism. The Lyon-Smith gang, a secret syndicate formed to corner number two spring wheat, needed an insider to report the ebb and flow of wheat supplies in store. Gifford’s position gave him ownership of this information, and he saw no reason why he should not profit from its sale.
For weeks, Gifford and his syndicate cohorts discreetly bought up futures. All the while, Gifford kept his hand on the elevator spigot, evening out prices, holding off and letting out, keeping the bears from getting spooked. He waited and watched for the short sellers to wander too far from the available supply.
By June the snare was sprung. Those who had sold grain they did not possess saw the trap too late. Overextended traders returned forcibly to the facts of real grain. Gifford then squeezed the spigot tight. The bears needed grain in order to cover their positions. But the grain already belonged to the men who called those positions in.
The syndicate, holding all the buy contracts, could now name its price. Law compelled the short sellers to meet the orders by the end of the month or face prison and worse than prison. Gifford’s net worth rose faster than a hot-air balloon, and by the end of June he had joined the aristocracy.
Gifford broke no laws. There were no laws, for the victims of capital always resist any protection that might prevent them from running the very sting that has stung them. But Gifford and friends mastered every step of the corner except how to “bury the corpse.” By corner’s end, the wisest course left open to him was to cash out, retire from warehousing, and get the hell out of town.
With the animal luck of the true businessman, Gifford liquidated just before the Great Fire of 1871. The inferno gutted the city. It blazed out of control for days, claiming fields, timber, and lives as far away as Wisconsin. The operator he sold to was burned out, but Gifford walked away from catastrophe untouched.
He considered tucking in his improbable winnings and calling it a day. How many consecutive spins of the wheel could one man hit? His fortune would have sufficed to keep him in his hobby—European semi-clad male torsos from any antique era—forever. But the man had been born a farmer, and grain in the ear demanded replanting.
He could not return to the Chicago grain trade without being lynched. But Gifford could still cup his hands and sip from some other spot along that golden torrent. On a raiding party to Britain in search of art treasures, he brought back two ancient Scots distillers to see what they could do to transubstantiate American corn and rye into the water of life. At first, the Scots decried the low malt percentages of American whiskeys. But the market soon helped them appreciate these so-called blends.
Gifford housed his experts in a state-of-the-art distillery on South Ashland. His first experiments hit the markets just in time to profit from the Whiskey Ring crackdown. The area’s distillers had long enjoyed a comfortable system of shared tax abatements with the government revenuers. Kickbacks more than sufficed to hush up the press, retailers, and officials of all rank and stripe. When the special interests grew too numerous to placate, some poor, overlooked graftee blew the whistle, and the jig was up.
Authorities seized sixteen of the area’s largest spirit-makers for tax fraud. Two hundred and forty indictments rained down nationally, resulting in more than a hundred convictions. But government pardoned the leaders, and a scandalized nation concluded that a portion of the abatements now lined the campaign coffers of the Republican Party.
Had Gifford entered the trade any earlier, he would have been more than happy to participate in the redistribution of funds. Tremendous savings, not to mention a chance to contribute to the industry’s political protectors: any entrepreneur would have been a fool to pass on that deal.
But Gifford had come to the business too late, and so escaped arrest and dismantling. Having missed the party, all he could do was profit from the hangover. The punishments doled out on his competition eased Gifford’s way into a tight market. G. Gifford’s Blended American Double Eagle Co
rn Whiskey made its infant name on honesty. It came from a clean still, one that “gladly paid its civic obligations in full.” And the mash did eventually improve with the years.
When the spirits business began to generate money, Gifford plowed his returns back into an old farmer’s obsession. He had long been convinced that industrial waste products, particularly his own and those of Chicago’s Packingtown, could fashion a better fertilizer than the ones the prairies now employed. He bought up a fertilizer plant in the town of Lake, just south of the city, and began to experiment with its product.
Gifford promoted this work as uniting the best components of profit-making and public benefaction. After the fashion of the rich, he turned author, writing a series of pamphlets outlining his theories. What his ideas lacked in chemistry, they made up for in moral duty:
Man must perfect those cycles of voyage and return that he has stolen from the First Developer. He must restore the ends of spent crops to crops altogether renewed, thereby teaching Nature how to revive herself . . .
One of these baroque pamphlets came to the attention of Douglas Clare. This man Gifford’s goals meshed with the ones that Clare had long nurtured. The chemist Neeland had already presented the Clares with a plan for mixing used soda ash with peat and South American guano, converting the mixture to a new, all-purpose fertilizer. Complete and balanced: one that blended nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus to revive exhausted soils and promote inferior earth to full fertility.
Certainly the products of industrial chemistry could compete with animal manure, if not in price, then in overall return on investment. The cheapest way for Clare to acquire the expertise and manufacturing base needed to enter the fertilizer trade would be to acquire this already established outfit. That way, its people could learn in the classroom of existing practice, without paying for a costly education.
Gifford Industries would also give Douglas his long-coveted presence in Chicago. The city had won the race to become the continent’s great inland capital. Half the nation’s rail miles terminated there, draining the frontier of its wheat, cattle, pork, and timber, and replacing these with houses, manufactured goods, and dressed meats. Chicago had become the price setter, supplier, transfer agent, and chief wholesaler to the opened continent.
More than any other single place, Chicago was Douglas’s gateway to the future. Clare’s sales drifted farther west of Appalachia. Clare’s own plants and warehouses had themselves begun to plot an arrow that pointed at the shores of Lake Michigan. This man Gifford already had his grubstake where Clare needed to be.
Even better, George Gifford enjoyed a heavy cash position. Clare was temporarily trapped between strapped creditors. A deal with Gifford would not only pay for itself; it would bail out a fair quantity of Clare’s remaining red ink.
Such a creative transfer seemed almost sleight of hand. Yet it made sense for both parties. For in return for salvation, Clare could give Gifford Industries a size, name, reputation, and distribution arm that extended well beyond the upstart’s current reach. Distillery and fertilizer factory would join a far larger operation whose revenues were as good as gold, once its solvency was guaranteed. The union promised Gifford a bigger, better, wider toy train set to run his trains on. And it also gave him something that money and all the antique nude statues in the world could not buy: Eastern respectability.
Douglas proposed bringing Gifford into the firm as a shareholder, in exchange for Gifford cashing out Clare’s debts. In effect, Clare would sell to the assumer of its debts that portion of the firm already owed to other creditors.
To those involved, the deal seemed preordained. It belonged to the family of charmed transactions: gain without risk, benefit without cost: the self-extending trailhead, the self-hoisting well. When all the books settled, each enterprise would be stronger and all parties wealthier than they were before the handshake. The only thing lost would be history, that fuel that business had, by nature, to keep shoveling into the boiler.
In a last-minute spasm of moral doubt, Samuel confronted the boys. Was it right to bring a liquor-maker into a business that sold soap as the measure of civilization? What would old Jephthah have said?
Douglas briefly considered the objection. In fact, there was none. His grandfather had sold ice to Martinique to fight yellow fever. He certainly would have approved selling ash to farmers to help feed the nation. And he’d ended his days in a public house. What could he possibly have against lubricating the thirsty?
That last objection met, Douglas unrolled a proposal that quickly won the approval of Clare’s board as well as everyone on Gifford’s side of the table. What human dared oppose the inevitable logic of a good deal?
And so the offspring of Clare brought soap’s antithesis into that single-souled corporation whose charter summed to a life beyond its combined families. Samuel resigned the firm’s presidency, and Douglas took his place. Peter reserved for himself the title of General Manager, and Gifford reveled in the ceremonial moniker of Chairman. Each man attained the office he most needed and assumed the responsibilities he best fulfilled.
With the old bookkeeping trick of proliferating loaves and fishes, Peter and Douglas increased the existing Clare shares enough to leave their compliant new associate in a comfortable minority position. Gifford’s flood of ready assets saw the firm through the worst of its liquidity crisis. Creditworthiness restored, Clare launched a successful bond issue. The bonds promised to finance further expansion, which in turn earned it the license to borrow more. As always, a firm’s worth lay in how many outstanding loans it could generate.
Peter, Douglas, and George Gifford brought Clare Soap and Chemical into fiscal adolescence. If not an absolutely silent partner, Gifford was willing to remain deeply laconic. Douglas came West on several occasions to oversee various ventures, including the founding of the new agricultural chemical factory in Lacewood. Gifford, in turn, often traveled out to the headquarters on the glittering eastern coast.
But Peter never met with him on those visits. The eccentric Clare saw no need to complicate a good thing with gratuitous discussions. It amused Gifford to indulge his partner. For banquet entertainment, Peter Clare stories exceeded even nude antiquities. And so, for the better part of a decade, until Gifford’s death, Clare’s chairman and its general manager never communicated by any means more intimate than telegraph.
The two heads of the giant in embryo could not have been more inimical. The white recluse hid out in his Spartan Back Bay town house, while the statue-collector threw lavish entertainments for meat-packing millionaires in his bric-a-brac-encrusted, neo-Romanesque mansion on the north lake shore’s Hot Dog Row.
Yet the two men complemented each other. Each made up the other’s temperamental deficits. The stoic hermit plotted out grand strategies, while the gadabout reveled in all the unsavory flesh-pressing and shoulder-rubbing whose absence had heretofore kept the firm provincial. With Douglas as rudder between them, the company management managed to come to understand something of the heart of man. And man, after all, was the creature that all their joint labors had to appease.
Sometime during the boom year that followed the merger, Samuel passed wordlessly away. He gave out while traveling to Mount Auburn to visit the grave of his adored wife, Dorcas, a good soul who remained bewildered even in the tomb.
The entrepreneur lives and dies by ingenuity. Action enriches fortune, and fortune enables further action. But the entrepreneur’s freed resources will turn on him, one by one, the way that the tin soldiers of popular verse turn on their sadistic boy generals. Trade grows steadily more efficient until it everywhere holds the day. Until, at last, it cuts out all the middlemen.
CLARE SOAP AND CHEMICAL CO.
Boston and Walpole, Mass., & Chicago, Ill.
Now that Laura looks, it seems a kind of epidemic. Not just that packed cancer room at the hospital, the ring of bodies circled around their IVs, a new batch each time she visits. Not just the neighbor’s sister-in-law’s
father. It’s everywhere. She cannot turn around without running into someone else. Everybody is battling cancer. Why did she never see these people before?
They’re all over the Harvest Fair. A boy two years younger than Tim rests against a stack of pumpkins, his skin an eerie green. The bared, patchy head of a woman hoisting a papoose and swigging apple cider, clear as a brand. Laura watches as a college-age kid with a backwards ball cap and iodined arms entertains his girlfriend, mocking the townie rituals while waiting their turn to bob for apples.
She starts to recognize them on no evidence whatsoever. Something about the old guy selling the squash-mounted candles. He’s nursing something in his gut the size of his fist. No proof. Laura just knows.
She has come late to this affliction. Yet they recognize her, too, despite the careful makeup that took her an hour to apply. They give her that silent salute, eyes held a fraction too long in regrettable kinship. A secret-society handshake, less anger in it than Laura would have thought. It’s a best-foot-forward, this questioning gaze, this You too? They cannot help but stare a little, at all their companions on this expedition for which no one signed on.
She walks along with Ellen, pretending interest in the standing racks of needlework. Ellen fidgets, denying that their pace has anything to do with her mother’s being winded.
“Aren’t you cold?” Laura asks. “Don’t you need a jacket?”
“Sure, Mom. Even the slugs are wearing windbreakers.”
Tim spins ten paces ahead of them, afraid whatever virus that makes women women might be contagious. He cuts switchbacks through the crowd, searching for that elusive booth specializing in Amish braided bread and Mortal Kombat III cartridges.
“You think it’s like this in Champaign or Decatur?” Laura wonders.
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