The Square Pegs

by Irving Wallace

  President Lincoln, however, was still grateful for Train’s unofficial efforts on behalf of the Union in England. He invited Train to Washington. Train never forgot that he was “warmly received by the President,” as well as by members of the Cabinet and a small group of senators. “I had heard very much, of course, about the freedom of speech of Mr. Lincoln, and was not, therefore, astonished to hear him relate several characteristic anecdotes. In fact, three of the most prominent men in the United States at that time were striving to outdo one another in jests the President, Senator Nesmyth of Oregon, and Senator Nye.”

  Train and his wife were among the five thousand persons invited to Lincoln’s second inaugural ball. Mrs. Train, her hair powdered gold, wore a gown of blue silk and lace, and appeared, it may be presumed, with some reluctance. She was a Southerner, sympathetic to the Confederacy, and remained a source of much irritation to her husband throughout the conflict.

  About this time Train, though only thirty-three, began to promote what was to be his last major venture. It was his greatest undertaking, and, most likely, his most profitable one. The project involved the financing and building of the Union Pacific Railroad.

  Train admitted that his idea grew out of his anger with the British for blocking his street railways. He was determined to get even. He saw his chance when the British opened the Suez Canal as a short cut to the Orient. He would compete for Far Eastern trade by building a transcontinental railway across the Rocky Mountains, thus giving America a shorter route to the Orient. He approached Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt with his visionary project. Vanderbilt told him: “If you attempt to build a railway across the desert and over the Rocky Mountains, the world will call you a lunatic.” Despite this warning, Train went ahead on his own.

  In 1862 he obtained a charter from Congress to construct a road running from the Missouri River to California. When it came to raising the cash necessary to start the road, he was turned down everywhere. Then he remembered something from his foreign experience. “In Paris, a few years before, I had been much interested in new methods of finance as devised by the brothers Emile and Isaac Perrere. These shrewd and ingenious men, finding that old methods could not be used to meet many demands of modern times, invented entirely new ones which they organized into two systems known as the Crédit Mobilier and the Crédit Foncier or systems of credit based on personal property and land.”

  Through the Pennsylvania legislature Train established the Crédit Mobilier of America. While the United States government financed the Union Pacific, it was the Crédit Mobilier that served as a trust to finance the actual construction of the railroad. Immediately, Train raised $1,400,000 from sixteen friends in Boston, including Cyrus H. McCormick and William H. Macy. He himself invested $150,000.

  On December 2, 1863, ground was broken near Omaha for the first mile of the Union Pacific. Train was the only one of the original founders present. He made a speech and a glowing promise. “Ten millions of immigrants will settle in this golden land in twenty years,” he said. “If I had not lost all my energy, ambition, and enterprise, I would take hold of this immigration scheme, but the fact is I have gone too fast, and today I am the best played-out man in the country.” This self-analysis was not inaccurate, yet Train was businessman enough to buy himself 5,000 lots in Omaha. He realized that the railroad would make Omaha. Before his death, these lots were worth $30,000,000.

  Train predicted that the Union Pacific would be completed by 1870. For this prediction, he complained, he was “denounced as a madman and a visionary.” The road snaked its way West, laid by twenty thousand tough Irish and Chinese laborers guarded by federal troops against Indian raids, all under the leadership of General Granville M. Dodge, who had been an engineer with Sherman on the march to the sea. It was finished, not in seven years, as Train had predicted, but in six, when the last, golden, spike was driven in at Ogden, Utah.

  Shortly after, Train left the Crédit Mobilier or was dropped from it. He claimed: “Through my suggestion and through my plans and energy … this mighty highway across the continent … was created.” He said he had built the Union Pacific. He had not, of course. He had helped finance it and publicize it. The men who really built the road were Congressman Oakes Ames of Massachusetts and Thomas Clark Durant, the road’s first vice-president.

  Train had long been out of the Crédit Mobilier when it blew sky high in one of the greatest scandals of the time. The New York Sun made known the story in 1872. The stockholders of the government-sponsored Union Pacific had contracted with the stockholders of the Crédit Mobilier to build the road. But it so happened that the stockholders of the Union Pacific were also the stockholders of the Crédit Mobilier.

  For every dollar the Crédit Mobilier spent in construction it charged the Union Pacific and the government two dollars. To prevent investigation, Congressman Ames carefully distributed free stock in Crédit Mobilier to fellow representatives and senators. This stock paid 625 per cent dividends within a year. Before the thievery was fully exposed the financiers of the Union Pacific had made themselves almost $44,000,000 in profits. The subsequent scandal ruined the reputations of the Vice-President of the United States and a great number of congressmen, and publicly embarrassed the entire Republican Party.

  By the time the scandal took place Train had drifted far from the world of finance. He had become interested in politics and obsessed with a desire for publicity. Most journalists who spoke with him, while admitting his brilliance, felt that he was misdirecting his abilities. Several thought that he was losing his grip. “The Train of ideas,” a reporter on The Nebraskan remarked, “sometimes lacks the coupling-chains.”

  The reporter on The Nebraskan was unusually perceptive. As a boy-merchant and young promoter Train had displayed remarkable talent. He was intelligent, clever, audacious, energetic, and inventive. But he lacked a central drive, a realistic goal. He was scatterbrained. He did too much too easily and too quickly. With concentration and purpose he might have made a solid reputation in any one of several professions as a financier, an author, or a politician.

  Gradually, over a period of forty years, he descended into the most pitiful unreality and eccentricity because he wanted only attention. When he could no longer win attention through normal accomplishment, he employed every extreme stunt that came to mind. He cultivated the art of astonishment. Instead of honest dissent, born of careful thought and conviction, he became contrary for the mere sake of sensation.

  He actively entered politics in 1869 because he had a Messiah complex. But he was a Messiah without a message, having merely the forensic equipment and evangelistic fervor to communicate nothing. As a politician, he was a half-baked thinker, part democrat and part fascist, part genius and part fool, never really insane, but surely psychopathic.

  After his Crédit Mobilier period he was wealthy. On his two-and-a-half acres at Newport he had a villa and a special building for bowling and billiards that cost $100,000. He had a $50,000 guesthouse for his father-in-law. He had six carriages, and he claimed that it cost him $2,000 a week to live. But after he plunged into politics he neglected his business, his family, and his home, and lost all three in the continuing affair with his ego.

  It was in a Dublin jail one of fifteen he occupied in his lifetime, usually for siding with revolutionary causes or assuming the bad debts of others that Train first conceived, as he put it, “a feeling of confidence that I might one day be President of the United States.”

  1872 was a confusing election year, and Train hoped that he might benefit by the confusion. Ulysses S. Grant, a shy, highly moral man who liked whiskey, horses, cigars (he once smoked twenty-four in a day), and low company, was presented for re-election by the Republican Party. Grant’s well-meaning incompetence had permitted a shocking carnival of corruption during his first term. Many high-minded Republicans had had enough of him. They determined to break away from the regular party and nominate their own candidate.

  These Liberal Republicans
met in Cincinnati, wrote a platform that severely indicted Grant, and then cast about for a man who could defeat him. George Francis Train thought he was that man. On the second day of the convention he rose and shouted: “All aboard! Get aboard the express train of George Francis Train!” There was a brief snake-dance by his admirers, but when the actual balloting began, few delegates got aboard. On the sixth ballot, the pink-faced, angular, crusading editor of the New York Tribune, Horace Greeley, who looked like somebody’s grandmother, and whose slogan was “Turn the rascals out,” was nominated for the presidency. Train was astounded. He had hoped, even at the eleventh hour, that “the people would see the futility of supporting Greeley, and of placing me at the head of the ticket.”

  But Train was not through. If no one would place him on an existing ticket, he would create a ticket of his own. And so he became the sole candidate of the Citizens’ Party. His entry into the campaign, however, did not clear the air for the voters. Everyone, it seemed, was running for the presidency that year. When the regular Democratic Party agreed to affiliate with the Liberal Republican in support of Greeley, a die-hard group of Independent Democrats refused to go along. These Democrats nominated Charles O’Conor, a prominent New York attorney, as the first Catholic ever to run for the presidency. Meanwhile, the Prohibition Party offered the electorate James Black, of Pennsylvania. And, perhaps most startling of all, the Equal Rights Party convened in New York City to nominate Victoria Claflin Woodhull for president.

  Of all the candidates, George Francis Train was the most tireless. Resplendent in a blue swallow-tail coat with brass buttons, he stumped the nation from coast to coast, delivering 1,000 speeches that earned him $90,000 in admission fees. “I went into the campaign as into a battle,” he wrote later. “I forced fighting at every point along the line, fiercely assailing Grant and his nepotism on the one hand, and Greeley, and the spirit of compromise and barter that I felt his nomination represented, on the other.” Grant ignored Train’s broadsides, but Greeley was once sufficiently provoked to call him “an ass, a lunatic, a charlatan and a mountebank.”

  In his campaign oratory Train promised to increase immigration from Europe, build trade with the Orient, and smash corruption. Once, when he denounced a ring of grafters in New York, he was asked to name names. He replied: “Hoffman, Tweed, Sweeney, Fisk, and Gould … Tweed and Sweeney are taxing you from head to foot, while their horses are living in palaces … To the lamp-post! All those in favor of hanging Tweed to a lamp-post, say aye!” As a matter of fact, Train exposed William Marcy “Boss” Tweed and his Tammany Hall gang, who would steal $200,000,000 from New York City in six years, long before The New York Times and Thomas Nast took credit for the same feat.

  Train’s interviews, speeches, and writings during the course of the campaign became more and more unrestrained. He told one interviewer: “Of course you know that you are talking to the next President. I am also the greatest man in the world. I can give Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Mohammed, and all the rest of them, fifty on the string, and then discount them.” His election-year literature called him the “man of destiny,” ready and willing to rule the country with one hundred of America’s wealthiest men as his advisers, and added that he was “an instrument in the hands of some mysterious power, to emancipate the people from the slavery of Party and the Fanaticism of ages.” An editor of the Washington Capital, attending one of his speeches, decided that he should have been an actor, reporting: “He double-shuffles and stamps on the floor ‘till the dust obscures him; he beats his breast, clenches his fist, clutches his hair, plays ball with the furniture, outhowls the roaring elements… . And yet he is not happy; no, he wants to be President.”

  President he could not be. Millions heard and enjoyed him, but did not take him seriously. When the votes were counted, U. S. Grant had 3,597,132. Horace Greeley had 2,834,125, Charles O’Conor had 29,408, James Black had 5,608, Victoria Woodhull had not been permitted to vote even for herself, and Train well, as far as the statistics could be trusted, Train had no votes at all.

  He was bitter. He voiced his bitterness. “I thought I knew something of the people, and felt confident that they would prefer a man of independence, who had accomplished something for them, to a man who was a mere tool of his party, a distributor of patronage to his friends and relatives… . But I was mistaken. The people, as Barnum has said, love to be humbugged.”

  It is difficult to think that he expected to win, or that he even took his three-year campaign for the Republican nomination and then for the presidency seriously. For late in 1870, when he was contesting for the nomination, he suddenly interrupted his campaign to take a trip around the world. True, he may have wanted to dramatize his candidacy by a spectacular feat. Or, as he claimed, he may have wanted to show his fellow Americans the value of fast transportation. But most likely, he wanted publicity for its own sake.

  And so, at the age of forty-one, almost the age that Verne made Phileas Fogg, Train started westward in his race around the world to prove that the journey could be done in eighty days. Actually, he was away more than eighty days. He started from San Francisco early in August and did not return until late in December. While his traveling probably took eighty days, there was a two-month diversionary detour in France.

  Train crossed the United States on the new Union Pacific he had helped to build. He gave 28 speeches in California, netting himself $10,000 and a host of new enemies. A talk he gave in San Francisco to industrialists and politicians was typical “If I had been the Federal general in command of California at the time [of the Civil War],” he said, “I should have hanged certain men, some of whom are present.”

  On August 1, 1870, he boarded the Great Republic for Yokohama. When he reached Singapore he learned that Napoleon had been crushed at Sedan and that France was in a state of chaos. Nevertheless, he decided to proceed directly to France as the quickest route to his transatlantic connections in Liverpool.

  After more than two months of travel, he arrived in Marseilles. No sooner had he settled in his suite at the Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix, than delegates of the revolutionary Commune called upon him. a We have heard of you and want you to join the revolution,” they told him. “Six thousand people are waiting for you now in the Opera House.”

  Train had never, previously, shown interest in the International. But there were people waiting to see and hear him. There was the promise of excitement and publicity. It was inducement enough. He hurried to the jammed Alhambra Opera House, where the audience chanted his name and the glory of the uprising. “When the shouting ceased,” he recalled in his autobiography, “I told the people that I was in Marseilles on a trip around the world, but as they had called upon me to take part in their movement, I should be glad to repay, in my own behalf, a small portion of the enormous debt of gratitude that my country owed to France for Lafayette… .”

  In the next weeks Train took over completely. He spoke against the Prussians. He spoke against Leon Gambetta’s Third Republic. He spoke on the average of seven times daily for twenty-three consecutive days. He led a march on the Marseilles military fortifications and helped run up the flag of the Red Republic. And finally, to give the Commune an experienced military leader, he summoned General Gustave Paul Cluseret from his Swiss exile. Cluseret had experience enough. He had fought for the North in the American Civil War, under General McClellan, and taken an active part in the Fenian Insurrection in Ireland. Now, handsome in a goldlaced uniform that Train purchased for him, he rushed off to the barricades in Paris. There, it might be added, he was arrested by the Commune itself for treason, eventually saved by government troops, and returned to Switzerland.

  Meanwhile, Train remained in Marseilles, where he almost lost his life. One morning, observing soldiers marching beneath his hotel balcony, he mistook them for comrades of the Commune and shouted: “Vive la Commune!” Too late, Train realized they were government troops. They halted. Five riflemen stepped forward, knelt, and took aim at Train. Quickly
Train snatched the flags of France and the United States off the balcony, draped them about his body, and shouted: “Fire, fire, you miserable cowards! Fire upon the flags of France and America wrapped around the body of an American citizen if you have the courage!” The firing squad was ordered back into line, and the troops moved on.

  Shortly after, Train left Marseilles. He did not get far. In Lyons he was arrested for revolutionary activity and thrown into jail. He smuggled a note out to his frantic secretary, George P. Bemis, which read: “Am in St. Joseph Prison and secretly incarcerated.” Bemis, through the intervention of Alexandre Dumas, visited Train, then cabled President Grant, the New York Sun, and the London Times for help. After thirteen days in prison, during which he lost thirty pounds, Train was released and taken to Tours.

  In the palace of the prefecture at Tours, he was ushered into the presence of the government leader, Leon Gambetta, who was seated at his desk. Gambetta did not stir. Train stood, waiting. “He made not the slightest signs of being aware that I was present. He did not even turn his face toward me. I did not learn until afterward that the distinguished Italian-Frenchman had one glass eye, and could see me just as well at an angle as he could full-face.”