Iron Empires
Page 42
“all United States bonds”: Ibid., 532.
“it required”: Cited in ibid., 536.
“The manner in which”: Hamilton A. Hill to Cooke, Feb. 11, 1871, in Oberholtzer, vol. 2, 99.
“Like Moses and Washington”: Jay Cooke’s memoir, 2; cited in Lubetkin, 13.
“The appearance”: Oberholtzer, vol. 1, 106.
“If successful”: Ibid., 113.
“the capitalists of Europe”: Jay Cooke, “A Decade of American Finance,” North American Review 175, no. 552 (Nov. 1902), 583.
“increase his income”: Oberholtzer, vol. 2, 108.
“a perfect storm”: Walla Walla Standard, cited in Oberholtzer, vol. 2, 119.
“salmon are not caught”: Ibid., 120.
One article: Ibid., 127–28.
“one uninterrupted field”: W. B. Hazen, “The Great Middle Region of the United States, and Its Limited Space of Arable Land,” North American Review 120, no. 246 (Jan. 1875), 1, 3.
“orange groves and monkeys”: Oberholzer, vol. 2, 120.
“Jay Cooke’s banana”: Josephson, The Robber Barons, 94.
“I have hundreds”: Cooke to Moorhead, Aug. 13, 1869, in Oberholtzer, vol. 2, 147.
“the bad odor”: Ibid., 151.
“I was stunned”: Cooke, “A Decade of American Finance,” 584.
“emigration across”: Oberholzer, vol. 2, 155.
“I flung my hat”: Ibid., 157.
“No extraordinary foresight”: Smalley, 170.
“with some pleasing”: Oberholtzer, vol. 2, 165.
“It is not seen”: Hancock to Cooke, Jan. 11, 1870, in ibid., 170.
“Our force was”: “A Brush with Indians,” New York Times, Sept. 30, 1872.
“Mr. Cooke resisted”: Oberholtzer, vol. 2, 171.
“Do you think”: Cooke to Drexel, Feb. 17, 1869, in ibid., 134.
“since the celebrated”: Ibid., 190.
“rather sneering”: Ibid., 220.
“I tell you”: Banning to Cooke, Sept. 23, 1870, in ibid., 246.
“The present actual”: Ibid., 381.
“even if signed”: Ibid., 418.
Junius Morgan was unhappy: See Strouse, 151.
Farmers and railroad: Sobel, 159.
He turned his face: Oberholtzer, vol. 2, 422.
“like a thunderclap”: Ibid.
“one or two gentlemen”: Strong, 493.
“I’ll tell you”: New York Herald, Sept. 19, 1873.
The collapse had: Stiles, 537.
“The kinds of bonds”: Ibid., 533.
The economy shrank: See Sobel, Panic, 192.
Railroad construction: The figures are from the National Bureau of Economic Research database: NBER Macrohistory: II. Construction, “U.S. Miles of Railroad Built, Bureau of the Census—Railway Age 1830–1952,” at http://www.nber.org/databases/macrohistory/contents/chapter02.html (accessed Sept. 2, 2019).
Grant made a pilgrimage: McFeely, 393–94.
“the corridors and parlors”: Harper’s Weekly, Oct. 11, 1873.
“prostration in business”: Grant, State of the Union address, Dec. 7, 1874.
“With the increasingly”: Chandler, The Visible Hand, 136.
“robber barons”: John Tipple, “The Anatomy of Prejudice: Origins of the Robber Baron Legend,” Business History Review 33, no. 4 (Winter 1959), 511.
“insinuation that pernicious conduct”: Ibid.
had “more wealth”: Clews, Twenty-Eight Years, 449.
“admirably adapted”: McAllister, 181.
“Money-getting”: Charles Francis Adams, 190.
The pace of: Sobel, 192.
Having detected: See Strouse, 151–52.
* * *
6. Jay Gould Returns
* * *
“sent an order”: Testimony of Jay Gould, Report of the United States Pacific Railway Commission, 10 vols. (Washington, DC: GPO, 1887–88), 446. (Hereafter, USPRC.)
“factually correct”: Grodinsky, Jay Gould, 118.
A rather different: See Klein, Union Pacific, vol. 1, 308.
“various have been”: New York Times, Mar. 15, 1874.
“a transaction worthy”: Charles FrancisAdams and Henry Adams, Chapters of Erie, 118.
“to have nothing”: Julia Dent Grant, 182.
“saw the whole”: United States Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on Banking and Currency, Gold Panic Investigation, March 1, 1870, p. 12. (Hereafter, Gold Panic.)
“damned old scoundrel”: Gold Panic, 175–76.
“Of course matters”: Ibid., 176.
“Hundreds of firms”: Ibid., 19.
“produced an impression”: Ibid., 334.
“Messrs. Gould and Fisk”: Charles FrancisAdams and Henry Adams, Chapters of Erie, 133.
Irked that Durant: Trottman, 47.
“Fisk had told us”: Wilson Report, 48.
“the most infamous”: USPRC, vol. 1, 441.
Another $50,000: Wilson Report, 295.
“was in rather”: The Story of Mr. Jay Gould, as Told by Himself, 11. This volume, published by the American News Company of New York, comprises selections from the transcript of Gould’s testimony before the US Senate Committee on Education and Labor on Sept. 5, 1883.
“without justification”: Union Pacific Railroad Company,Report of the Government Directors of the Union Pacific Railroad Company for the Year 1874.
“with farms and villages”: Union Pacific Railroad Company, Report of the Government Directors of the Union Pacific Railroad Company for the Year 1876.
The population: See Trottman, 102, for figures drawn from the US Census.
a record grain harvest: Grodinsky, Jay Gould, 122.
“Commodore Vanderbilt”: New York Times, Jan. 1, 1877.
“Can any sane person”: New York Evening Mail, June 3, 1881, cited by Trottman, n. 200.
few maneuvers: This description of the Kansas Pacific affair is based chiefly on Trottman, 147ff; Daggett, 220ff; and USPRC. Except where indicated, direct quotations are from USPRC testimony by Jay Gould, Henry Villard, Frederick Ames, and Oliver Ames II. Other sources consulted are Grodinsky, Jay Gould, and Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould, an energetic but ultimately unconvincing defense of Gould’s machinations in the affair.
“while the Kansas Pacific”: Grodinsky, Jay Gould, 178.
“the Union Pacific had reported”: Daggett, 229.
“He had his war paint”: USPRC, 704.
“It would have destroyed”: Ibid., 509.
“According to”: Ibid.
Later analysis: Another source estimates Gould’s profit as $5 million: see Klein, Union Pacific, vol. 1, 415. Klein’s admiration for the intricacies of Gould’s maneuvers may have desensitized him to the fact that Gould had mustered his undeniable manipulative skills for an attack on an enterprise of which he was, for most of that period, an officer.
“old, and had lost”: Charles FrancisAdams, 192.
* * *
7. Year of Upheaval
* * *
“In the space”: Select Committee on Existing Labor Troubles, Investigation of Labor Troubles in Missouri, Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, and Illinois, H.R. Rep. No. 4174, 49th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1887, p. 394. (Hereafter, Curtin Report.)
“The organization”: F. W. Taussig, “The South-Western Strike of 1886,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 1, no. 2 (January 1887), 185.
“Traffic Throttled”: Case, 152.
“the great upheaval”: The same phrase has also been applied to a strike on the Baltimore & Ohio in 1877.
“extreme in its magnitude”: Taussig, “The South-Western Strike,” 184.
“the most imposing”: Ware, xi.
the only national: Ibid., 3.
“defend [labor] from degradation”: Carroll D.Wright, “An Historical Sketch of the Knights of Labor,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 1, no. 2 (January 1887), 7.
“short and slight”: New York Sun, Mar. 28, 1886.
Once the or
ganization shed: Donald L. Kemmerer and Edward D. Wickersham, “Reasons for the Growth of the Knights of Labor in 1885–1886,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 3, no. 2 (January 1950).
“Capital has now”: Quoted in Foner, 7.
“long hours”: Dubofsky and Dulles, 170.
“The power of money”: New York Times, Jan. 31, 1874.
Although in 1870: Gordon, 53.
“The aim of the Knights”: Quoted in Chandler, The Railroads, 130.
“the big impersonal”: Ibid., 129.
“Knowing that amid”: George, 164.
“the farms were first”: Josiah Strong, 157.
“The final culmination”: See Whitman, Complete Prose Works, 300.
the historian C. Vann Woodward: See, generally, Woodward’s Reunion and Reaction.
“steal or starve”: Baltimore Sun, July 14, 1877, cited in Loomis, 54.
“a rifle diet”: Hyndman, 109.
“It is wrong”: Dubofsky and Dulles, 109.
“This enemy”: William M.Grosvenor, “The Communist and the Railway,” International Review 4 (September 1877), 585.
According to a compilation: The list can be found at Yellen, 33.
“in the hands”: New York Times, July 26, 1877.
“prosperous and powerful”: Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould, 346.
“Work enough?”: Curtin Report, 449.
“by laundering clothes”: Cited in Case, 88.
“Who put the Wabash”: Ibid., 93.
“one of the most eloquent”: Buchanan, 144.
“No such victory”: Cited in Ware, 144.
“alarming fact”: Powderly, The Path, 120.
“five men”: Powderly, Thirty Years, 494.
“eleven hours”: Curtin Report, 452.
“We saw very plainly”: Ibid., 553.
“the settlement so far”: Case, 139.
“The whole system”: Curtin Report, 468–69.
“if men and”: Powderly, The Path, 114.
“Precious lives were”: Ibid., 115.
“There are people”: Bureau of Labor Statistics and Inspection of Missouri, The Official History of the Great Strike of 1886 on the Southwestern Railway System (Jefferson City, Mo.: Tribune), 94. (Hereafter, Official History.)
“reported every move”: Powderly, The Path, 117.
Powderly himself only learned: Ibid., 118.
The railroads: Taussig, “The South-Western Strike.”
“masterly inactivity”: Ibid., 202.
“will force merchants”: Official History, 55.
It carried: Taussig, “The South-Western Strike.”
“You shall be”: Gould to Hoxie, cited in Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould, 359.
“We see no objection”: Official History, 68.
“In short”: Ibid., 79–81.
One Sunday night: The account of this meeting comes from Powderly, The Path, 134ff.
“essentially a pedagogue”: Ware, 145.
“in the throes”: Ibid., 375.
* * *
8. The Rise of Ned Harriman
* * *
“controlled fifty thousand”: William Z. Ripley, “Federal Financial Railway Regulation: The Alton as a Test Case,” North American Review 203, no. 725 (April 1916), 538.
“the last figure”: Kahn, 13.
“He fairly revelled”: Muir, 6.
“the loving-kindness”: Ibid.
“the best”: Kahn, 49.
“Then we have the satisfaction”: Kennan, vol. 2, 171–72. For a fuller accounting of the Southern Pacific’s battle with the Colorado River see Hiltzik, 42–50.
“never fully recovered”: Kennan, vol. 1, 3.
“Cold and austere”: Ibid., 4.
A pay dispute: C. M. Keys, “Harriman: The Man in the Making,” The World’s Work, 13, no. 3, (January 1907), 8460.
“compromised at $250”: Ibid.
“hangs a heavy”: Ibid.
“I am going”: Kennan, vol. 1, 11.
“Not one man”: Edwin Lefèvre, “Harriman,” American Magazine, June 1907, 118.
Yet he must: See John Moody and George Kibbe Turner, “The Masters of Capital in America: The Inevitable Railroad Monopoly,” McClure’s Magazine, January 1911, 335.
“extraordinary ‘nose for money’”: Ibid.
Two years later: Kennan, vol. 1, 15. An alternate version of the source of Harriman’s seed money is that he had sold the market short and profited from the collapse of the attempt by Gould and Fisk to corner gold, which triggered a marketwide panic in 1869. Kennan’s version has the advantages of greater plausibility and the biographer’s authority.
“I am dead tired”: Kahn, 14.
“simply brought to bear”: Ibid.
“at a moment”: Keys, “Harriman,” 8461.
“the depravity of the business”: Whitman, Complete Prose, 13. His broadside Democratic Vistas, from which these words are taken, was written in mid-1870 and published the following year.
“When I first came”: New York Times, Dec. 3, 1892. Numerous versions of this monologue exist of various degrees of frankness; see, for example, Sobel, Panic, 165.
“I can’t lose much”: Moody and Turner, “The Masters of Capital in America,” 335.
“Any biography”: The quotation is from R. S. Lovett, general counsel for the Harriman railroads, and appears in Persia Campbell, 6.
Arriving at the Ogdensburg: Kennan, vol. 1, 61.
had been appointed: For the history of the Ogdensburg railroad, see Klein, The Life and Legend of E. H. Harriman, chap. 3.
Over the next year: Commercial & Financial Chronicle, May 24, 1879, and June 12, 1880.
“tall, blond, leonine”: Eckenrode and Edmunds, 38.
“big-hearted, hand-shaking chap”: George H.Cushing, “Hill Against Harriman: The Story of the Ten-Years’ Struggle for the Railroad Supremacy of the West,” American Magazine 63, no. 5 (September 1909).
“It is a common thing”: New York Times, Oct. 29, 1906.
“badly managed”: Kennan, vol. 1, 61.
“two crippled locomotives”: Moody and Turner, “The Masters of Capital in America,” 336.
“had great strategic”: Quoted in Kennan, vol. 1, 65–66.
Harriman’s brother-in-law: Klein, The Life and Legend of E. H. Harriman, 51.
“I knew that”: Kennan, vol. 1, 66.
The “importance of”: Ibid.
* * *
9. The First Skirmish
* * *
“The road will be”: Quoted in Stover, 21.
Advertisements placed in East Coast: A sample newspaper ad can be found in ibid., 47.
“a monument”: Charles Francis Adams and Henry Adams, Chapters of Erie, 5.
“Little Egypt”: This nickname for a region of southern Illinois is thought to have originated with a Baptist minister and early settler who compared it to the fertile “Land of Goshen,” a part of Egypt referred to in the Bible.
“the ‘Egyptians’ turned out”: William K. Ackerman, 85.
By 1854: Ibid., 36.
At the urging: Klein, The Life and Legend of E. H. Harriman, 56.
“the assistance of rich”: Moody and Turner, “The Masters of Capital in America,” 338.
“It’s the best”: Ibid.
“twisted rails, burned ties”: Stover, 145.
“a train composed”: Reid, 28.
“shipped by steamboats”: Osborn to IC board, Dec. 30, 1882, in Ackerman, 115.
“bluest of blue”: Klein, The Life and Legend of E. H. Harriman, 54.
“I don’t like”: Moody and Turner, “The Masters of Capital in America,” 338. The authors misspelled William H. Osborn’s name as “Osborne” throughout their account, possibly confusing him with C. J. Osborne, a prominent Wall Street speculator of the period.
“How much of it”: Commercial and Financial Chronicle, March 1, 1884.
“Somehow or other”: Kahn, 13.
They founded the Chicago:
See Kennan, vol. 1, 72.
At 9 A.M.: Stover, 204.
“When Harriman had”: Ibid., 209.
Immigrants were pouring: See “Illinois Central Railroad Company: Report of the Directors to the Stockholders,” Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Mar. 6, 1886.
That was a huge: For a sample of contemporary share prices, see Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Dec. 5, 1885.
“who had previously been a broker”: Satterlee, 243.
“There is no doubt”: Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Feb. 19, 1887.
“a prejudice against”: Satterlee, 244.
the “Bismarck”: For Morgan’s ambition in this direction, see Strouse, 239ff.
Industrialists and economists: Strouse, 407.
* * *
10. A Community of Interests
* * *
On the surface: USPRC, vol. 1, 3.
“almost valueless”: Ibid., 20.
“perfect and absolute”: Ibid., 9.
“two rusty streaks”: Trottman, n. 274.
“With a good deal”: Charles Francis Adams, 193.
“upon the principle”: Union Pacific Railroad Company, Report of the Government Directors of the Union Pacific Railroad Company for the Year 1884, p. 7.
“Everything in Colorado”: USPRC, vol. 1, 47.
“have done away”: Quoted in Trottman, 216.
“devoted itself honestly”: USPRC, 50.
“my first experience”: Charles Francis Adams, 192.
“has been wholly selfish”: Commercial and Financial Chronicle, Jan. 12, 1889.
“struck me as a somewhat”: Report of the Senate Select Committee on Interstate Commerce, 49th Congress, 1st Session, Submitted to the Senate January 18, 1886 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1886), 1207–8.
“For forty years”: Moody, Masters of Capital, 29.
Billy decided in 1879: See Strouse, 197ff.
“the largest ever”: New York Tribune, November 27, 1879.
60,000 shares: Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould, 242.
This was a road: Strouse, 246–47.
“I look on”: New York Tribune, July 20, 1885.