THE VANDERBILT FORTUNE INCREASES MANIFOLD
Vanderbilt's ambition was to become the richest man in America. With
three railroads in his possession he now aggressively set out to
grasp a fourth--the Erie Railroad. This was another of the railroads
built largely with public money. The State of New York had
contributed $3,000,000, and other valuable donations had been given.
At the very inception of the railroad corruption began [Footnote:
Report of the New York State and Erie Railroad Company, New York
State Assembly Document No. 50, 1842.] The tradesmen, landowners and
bankers who composed the company bribed the Legislature to relinquish
the State's claim, and then looted the railroad with such consummate
thoroughness that in order to avert its bankruptcy they were obliged
to borrow funds from Daniel Drew. This man was an imposing financial
personage in his day. Illiterate, unscrupulous, picturesque in his
very iniquities, he had once been a drover, and had gone into the
steamboat business with Vanderbilt. He had scraped in wealth partly
from that line of traffic, and in part from a succession of
buccaneering operations. His loan remaining unpaid, Drew indemnified
himself by taking over, in 1857, by foreclosure, the control of the
Erie Railroad.
For the next nine years Drew manipulated the stock at will, sending
the price up or down as suited his gambling schemes. The railroad
degenerated until travel upon it became a menace; one disaster
followed another. Drew imperturbably continued his manipulation of
the stock market, careless of the condition of the road. At no time
was he put to the inconvenience of even being questioned by the
public authorities. On the contrary, the more millions he made the
greater grew his prestige and power, the higher his standing in the
community. Ruling society, influenced solely by money standards,
saluted him as a successful man who had his millions, and made no
fastidious inquiries as to how he got them. He was a potent man; his
villainies passed as great astuteness, his devious cunning as
marvelous sagacity.
GOULD OVERREACHES VANDERBILT
Vanderbilt resolved to wrest the Erie Railroad out of Drew's hands.
By secretly buying its stock he was in a position in 1866 to carry
out his designs. He threw Drew and his directors out, but
subsequently realizing Drew's usefulness, reinstated him upon
condition that he be fully pliable to the Vanderbilt interests.
Thereupon Drew brought in as fellow directors two young men, then
obscure but of whom the world was to hear much--James Fisk, Jr., and
Jay Gould. The narrative of how these three men formed a coalition
against Vanderbilt; how they betrayed and then outgeneraled him at
every turn; proved themselves of a superior cunning; sold him large
quantities of spurious stock; excelled him in corruption; defrauded
more than $50,000,000, and succeeded--Gould, at any rate--in keeping
most of the plunder--this will be found in detail where it more
properly belongs--in the chapter of the Gould fortune describing that
part of Gould's career connected with the Erie Railroad.
Baffled in his frantic contest to keep hold of that railroad--a hold
that he would have turned into many millions of dollars of immediate
loot by fraudulently watering the stock, and then bribing the
Legislature to legalize it as Gould did--Vanderbilt at once set in
motion a fraudulent plan of his own by which he extorted about
$44,000,000 in plunder, the greater portion of which went to swell
his fortune.
The year 1868 proved a particularly busy one for Vanderbilt. He was
engaged in a desperately devious struggle with Gould. In vain did his
agents and lobbyists pour out stacks of money to buy legislative
votes enough to defeat the bill legalizing Gould's fraudulent issue
of stock. Members of the Legislature impassively took money from both
parties. Gould personally appeared at Albany with a satchel
containing $500,000 in greenbacks which were rapidly distributed. One
Senator, as was disclosed by an investigating committee, accepted
$75,000 from Vanderbilt and then $100,000 from Gould, kept both
sums,--and voted with the dominant Gould forces. It was only by means
of the numerous civil and criminal writs issued by Vanderbilt judges
that the old man contrived to force Gould and his accomplices into
paying for the stock fraudulently unloaded upon him. The best terms
that he could get was an unsatisfactory settlement which still left
him to bear a loss of about two millions. The veteran trickster had
never before been overreached; all his life, except on one occasion,
[Footnote: In 1837 when he had advanced funds to a contractor
carrying the mails between Washington and Richmond, and had taken
security which proved to be worthless.] he had been the successful
sharper; but he was no match for the more agile and equally sly,
corrupt and resourceful Gould. It took some time for Vanderbilt to
realize this; and it was only after several costly experiences with
Gould, that he could bring himself to admit that he could not hope to
outdo Gould.
A NEW CONSOLIDATION PLANNED
However, Vanderbilt quickly and multitudinously recouped himself for
the losses encountered in his Erie assault. Why not, he argued,
combine the New York Central and the Hudson River companies into one
corporation, and on the strength of it issue a vast amount of
additional stock?
The time was ripe for a new mortgage on the labor of that generation
and of the generations to follow. Population was wondrously
increasing, and with it trade. For years the New York Central had
been paying a dividend of eight per cent. But this was only part of
the profits. A law had been passed in 1850 authorizing the
Legislature to step in whenever the dividends rose above ten per
cent, on the railroad's actual cost, and to declare what should be
done with the surplus. This law was nothing more or less than a blind
to conciliate the people of the State, and let them believe that they
would get some returns for the large outlay of public funds advanced
to the New York Central. No returns ever came. Vanderbilt, and the
different groups before him, in control of the road had easily evaded
it, just as in every direction the whole capitalist class pushed
aside law whenever law conflicted with its aims and interests. It was
the propertyless only for whom the execution of law was intended.
Profits from the New York Central were far more than eight per cent.;
by perjury and frauds the directors retained sums that should have
gone to the State. Every year they prepared a false account of their
revenues and expenditures which they submitted to the State
officials; they pretended that they annually spent millions of
dollars in construction work on the road--work, in reality, never
done. [Footnote: See Report of New York Special Assembly Committee on
Railroads, 1879, iv: 3,894.] The money was pocketed by them under
this device--a device that has since become a favorite of many
railroad and public utility corporations.
Unenforced as it was, this law was nevertheless an obstacle in the
way of Vanderbilt's plans. Likewise was another, a statute
prohibiting both the New York Central Railroad and the Hudson River
Railroad from increasing their stock. To understand why this latter
law was passed it is necessary to remember that the middle class--the
factory owners, jobbers, retail tradesmen and employing farmers--were
everywhere seeking by the power of law to prevent the too great
development of corporations. These, they apprehended, and with
reason, would ultimately engulf them and their fortunes and
importance. They knew that each new output of watered stock meant
either that the prevailing high freight rates would remain unchanged
or would be increased; and while all the charges had to be borne
finally by the working class, the middle class sought to have an
unrestricted market on its own terms.
ALARM OF THE TRADING CLASS
It was the opposition of the various groups of this class that
Vanderbilt expected and provided against. He was fully aware that the
moment he revealed his plan of consolidation boards of trade
everywhere would rise in their wrath, denounce him, call together
mass meetings, insist upon railroad competition and send pretentious,
firebreathing delegates to the State Capitol. Let them thunder, said
Vanderbilt placidly. While they were exploding in eruptions of talk
he would concentrate at Albany a mass of silent arguments in the form
of money and get the necessary legislative votes, which was all he
cared about.
Then ensued one of the many comedies familiar to observers of
legislative proceedings. It was amusing to the sophisticated to see
delegations indignantly betake themselves to Albany, submit
voluminous briefs which legislators never read, and with immense
gravity argue away for hours to committees which had already been
bought. The era was that of the Tweed regime, when the public funds
of New York City and State were being looted on a huge scale by the
politicians in power, and far more so by the less vulgar but more
crafty business classes who spurred Tweed and his confederates on to
fresh schemes of spoliation.
Laws were sold at Albany to the highest bidder. "It was impossible,"
Tweed testified after his downfall, "to do anything there without
paying for it; money had to be raised for the passing of bills."
[Footnote: Statement of William M. Tweed before Special Investigating
Committee of the New York Board of Aldermen. Documents of the Board
of Aldermen, 1877, Part II. Document No. 8:15-16.] Decades before
this, legislators had been so thoroughly taught by the landowners and
bankers how to exchange their votes for cash that now, not only at
Albany and Washington, but everywhere in the United States, both
legislative and administrative officials haggled in real astute
business style for the highest price that they could get.
One noted lobbyist stated in 1868 that for a favorable report on a
certain bill before the New York Senate, $5,000 apiece was paid to
four members of the committee having it in charge. On the passage of
the bill, a further $5,000 apiece with contingent expenses was added.
In another instance, where but a solitary vote was needed to put a
bill through, three Republicans put their figures up to $25,000 each;
one of them was bought. About thirty Republicans and Democrats in the
New York Legislature organized themselves into a clique (long styled
the "Black Horse Cavalry"), under the leadership of an energetic
lobbyist, with a mutual pledge to vote as directed. [Footnote:
Documents of the Board of Aldermen, 1877, Part II, No. 8; 212-213.]
"Any corporation, however extensive and comprehensive the privileges
it asked"--to quote from "The History of Tammany Hall"--"and however
much oppression it sought to impose upon the people in the line of
unjust grants, extortionate rates or monopoly, could convince the
Legislature of the righteousness of its request upon 'producing' the
proper sum."
A LEGALIZED THEFT OF $44,000,000
One act after another was slipped through the Legislature by
Vanderbilt in 1868 and 1869. On May 20, 1869, Vanderbilt secured, by
one bill alone, the right to consolidate railroads, a free grant of
franchises, and other rights worth hundreds of millions of dollars,
and the right to water stock and bonds to an enormous extent.
The printing presses were worked overtime in issuing more than
$44,000,000 of watered stock. The capital stock of the two roads was
thus doubled. Pretending that the railroads embraced in the
consolidation had a great surplus on hand, Vanderbilt, instead of
distributing this alleged surplus, apportioned the watered stock
among the stockholders as a premium. The story of the surplus was, of
course, only a pretense. Each holder of a $100 share received a
certificate for $180--that is to say, $80 in plunder for every $100
share that he held. [Footnote: Report of Assembly Committee on
Railroads, testimony of Alexander Robertson, an expert accountant,
1879, i:994-999.] "Thus," reported the "Hepburn Committee" (the
popular name for the New York State Assembly investigating committee
of 1879), "as calculated by this expert, $53,507,060 were wrongfully
added to the capital stock of these roads." Of this sum $44,000,000
was issued in 1869; the remainder in previous years. "The only answer
made by the roads was that the legislature authorized it," the
committee went on. "It is proper to remark that the people are quite
as much indebted to the venality of the men elected to represent them
in the Legislature as to the rapacity of the railroad managers for
this state of affairs." [Footnote: Ibid., i:21.]
Despite the fact that the report of the committee recorded that the
transaction was piracy, the euphemistic wording of the committee's
statement was characteristic of the reverence shown to the rich and
influential, and the sparing of their feelings by the avoidance of
harsh language. "Wrongfully added" would have been quickly changed
into such inconsiderate terms as theft and robbery had the case been
even a trivial one of some ordinary citizen lacking wealth and power.
The facts would have immediately been presented to the proper
officials for criminal prosecution.
But not a suggestion was forthcoming of haling Vanderbilt to the
criminal bar; had it been made, nothing except a farce would have
resulted, for the reason that the criminal machinery, while
extraordinarily active in hurrying petty lawbreakers to prison, was a
part of the political mechanism financed by the big criminals and
subservient to them.
"The $44,000,000," says Simon Sterne, a noted lawyer who, as counsel
for various commercial organizations, unravelled the whole matter
before the "Hepburn Committee," in 1879, "represented no more labor
than it took to print the script." It was notorious, he adds, "that
the cost of the consolidated railroads was less than $44,000,000,"
[Footnote: "Life of Simon Sterne," by John Foord, 1903:179-181.] In
increasing the stock to $86,000,000 Vanderbilt and his confederates
therefore stole the difference between the cost and the maximum of
the stock issue. So great were the profits, both open and concealed,
of the consolidated railroads that notwithstanding, as Charles
Francis Adams computed, "$50,000 of absolute water had been poured
out for each mile of road between New York and Buffalo," the market
price of the stock at once shot up in 1869 from $75 a share to $120
and then to $200.
And what was Vanderbilt's share of the $44,000,000? His inveterate
panegyrist, Croffut, in smoothly defending the transaction gives this
illuminating depiction of the joyous event: "One night, at midnight,
he (Cornelius Vanderbilt) carried away from the office of Horace F.
Clark, his son-in-law, $6,000,000 in greenbacks as a part of his
share of the profits, and he had $20,000,000 more in new stock."
[Footnote: "The Vanderbilts": 103. Croffut in a footnote tells this
anecdote: "When the Commodore's portrait first appeared on the bonds
of the Central, a holder of some called one day and said: 'Commodore,
glad to see your face on them bonds. It's worth ten per cent. It
gives everybody confidence.' The Commodore smiled grimly, the only
recognition he ever made of a compliment. ''Cause,' explained the
visitor, 'when we see that fine, noble brow, it reminds us that
you'll never let anybody else steal anything.'"]
By this coup Vanderbilt about doubled his previous wealth. Scarcely
had the mercantile interests recovered from their utter bewilderment
at being routed than Vanderbilt, flushed with triumph, swept more
railroads into his inventory of possessions.
His process of acquisition was now working with almost automatic
ease.
First, as we have narrated, he extorted millions of dollars in
blackmail. With these millions he bought, or rather manipulated into
his control, one railroad after another, amid an onslaught of bribery
and glaring violations of the laws. Each new million that he seized
was an additional resource by which he could bribe and manipulate;
progressively his power advanced; and it became ridiculously easier
to get possession of more and more property. His very name became a
terror to those of lesser capital, and the mere threat of pitting his
enormous wealth against competitors whom he sought to destroy was
generally a sufficient warrant for their surrender. After his
consummation of the $44,000,000 theft in 1869 there was little
withstanding of him. By the most favorable account--that of Croffut--
his own allotment of the plunder amounted to $26,000,000. This sum,
immense, and in fact of almost inconceivable power in that day, was
enough of itself, independent of Vanderbilt's other wealth, to force
through almost any plan involving a seizing of competing property.
* * * * * * *
HE SCOOPS UP MORE RAILROADS.
Vanderbilt did not wait long. The ink on the $44,000,000 had barely
dried, before he used part of the proceeds to buy a controlling
interest in the Lake Shore Railroad, a competing line. Then rapidly,
by the same methods, he took hold of the Canada Southern and Michigan
Central.
The commercial interests looked on dumfounded. Under their very eyes
a process of centralization was going on, of which they but dimly,
stupidly, grasped the purport. That competition which they had so
long shouted for as the only sensible, true and moral system, and
which they had sought to buttress by enacting law after law, was
being irreverently ground to pieces.
Out of their own ranks were rising men, trained in their own methods,
who were amplifying and intensifying those methods to shatter the
class from which they had sprung. The different grades of the
propertied class, from the merchant with his fortune of $250,000 to
the retail tradesman, felt very comfortable in being able to look
down with a conscious superiority upon the working class from whom
their money was wrung. Scoffing at equality, they delighted in
setting themselves up as a class infinitely above the toilers of the
shop and factory; let him who disputes this consult the phrases that
went the rounds--phrases, some of which are still current--as, for
instance, the preaching that the moderately well-to-do class is the
solid, substantial element of any country.
Now when this mercantile class saw itself being far overtopped and
outclassed in the only measurement to which it attached any value--
that of property--by men with vast riches and power, it began to feel
its relegation. Although its ideal was money, and although it set up
the acquisition of wealth as the all-stimulating incentive and goal
of human effort, it viewed sullenly and enviously the development of
an established magnate class which could look haughtily and
dictatorially down upon it even as it constantly looked down upon the
working class. The factory owner and the shopkeeper had for decades
commanded the passage of summary legislation by which they were
enabled to fleece the worker and render him incapable of resistance.
To keep the worker in subjection and in their power they considered a
justifiable proceeding. But when they saw the railroad magnates
applying those same methods to themselves, by first wiping out
competition, and then by enforcing edicts regardless of their
interests, they burst out in furious rage.
VANDERBILT AND HIS CRITICS.
They denounced Vanderbilt as a bandit whose methods were a menace to
the community. To the onlooker this campaign of virulent assault was
extremely suggestive. If there was any one line of business in which
fraud was not rampant, the many official reports and court
proceedings of the time do not show it.
This widespread fraud was not occasional; it was persistent. In one
of the earlier chapters, the prevalence, more than a century ago, of
the practise of fraudulent substitution of drugs and foods was
adverted to. In the middle of the nineteenth century it was far more
extensive. In submitting, on June 2, 1848, a mass of expert evidence
on the adulteration of drugs, to the House of Representatives, the
House Select Committee on the Importation of Drugs pointed out:
For a long series of years this base traffic has been constantly
increasing, until it has become frightfully enormous. It would be
presumed, from the immense quantities, and the great variety of
inferior drugs that pass our custom houses, and particularly the
custom-house at New York, in the course of a single year, that this
country had become the great mart and receptacle of all of the refuse
merchandise of that description, not only from the European
warehouses, but from the whole Eastern market. [Footnote: Reports of
Committees, First Session, Thirtieth Congress, 1847-48, Vol. iii,
Report No. 664:3--The committee reported that opium was adulterated
with licorice paste and bitter vegetable extract; calomel, with chalk
and sulphate of barytes; quinine, with silicine, chalk and sulphate
of barytes; castor, with dried blood, gum and ammonia; gum
assafoetida with inferior gums, chalk and clay, etc., etc. (pp. 10
and 11).]
In presenting a formidable array of expert testimony, and in giving a
list of cases of persons having died from eating foods and drugs
adulterated with poisonous substances, the House Committee on
Epidemic Diseases, of the Forty-Sixth Congress, reported on February
4 1881:
That they have investigated, as far as they could ... the injurious
and poisonous compounds used in the preparation of food substances,
and in the manufacture of wearing apparel and other articles, and
find from the evidence submitted to them that the adulteration of
articles used in the every day diet of vast numbers of people has
grown, and is now practised, to such an extent as to seriously
endanger the public health, and to call loudly for some sort of
legislative correction. Drugs, liquors, articles of clothing, wall
paper and many other things are subjected to the same dangerous
process. [Footnote: House Reports, Third Session, Forty-sixth
Congress, 1880-81, Vol. i, Report No. 199: 1. The committee drafted a
bill for the prevention of these frauds; the capitalists concerned
smothered it.]
The House Committee on Commerce, reporting the next year, on March 4,
stated that "the evidence regarding the adulterations of food
indicates that they are largely of the nature of frauds upon the
consumer ... and injure both the health and morals of the people."
The committee declared that the practise of fraudulent substitutions
"had become universal." [Footnote: House Reports, First Session,
Forty-seventh Congress, 1881-82, Vol. ii, Report No. 634: 1-5.]
These few significant extracts, from a mass of official reports, show
that the commercial frauds were continuous, and began long before
Commodore Vanderbilt's time, and have prevailed up to the present.
Everywhere was fraud; even the little storekeepers, with their smug
pretensions to homely honesty, were profiting by some of the vilest,
basest forms of fraud, such as robbing the poor by the light-weight
and short-weight trick, [Footnote: These forms of cheating exist at
present to a greater extent than ever before. It is estimated that
manufacturers and shopkeepers cheat the people of the United States
out of $200,000,000 a year by the light-weight and short-weight
frauds. In 1907 the New York State Sealer of Weights and Measures
asserted that, in that State alone, $20,000,000 was robbed from the
consumers annually by these methods. Recent investigations by the
Bureau of Standards of the United States Department of Commerce and
Labor have shown that immense numbers of "crooked" scales are in use.
It has been conclusively established by the investigations of
Federal, State and municipal inspectors of weights and measures that
there is hardly an article put up in bottled or canned form that is
not short of the weight for which it is sold, nor is there scarcely a
retail dealer who does not swindle his customers by the light-weight
fraud. There are manufacturers who make a specific business of
turning out fraudulent scales, and who freely advertise the cheating
merits of these scales.] or (far worse) by selling skim milk, or
poisonous drugs or adulterated food or shoddy material. These
practises were so prevalent, that the exceptions were rarities
indeed.
If any administration had dared seriously to stop these forms of
theft the trading classes would have resisted and struck back in
political action. Yet these were the men--these traders--who
vociferously come forth with their homiletic trades against
Vanderbilt's criminal transactions, demanding that the power of him
and his kind be curbed.
It was not at all singular that they put their protests on moral
grounds. In a form of society where each man is compelled to fight
every other man in a wild, demoralizing struggle for self-
preservation, self-interest naturally usurps the supreme functions,
and this self-interest becomes transposed, by a comprehensible
process, into moralities. That which is profitable is perverted into
a moral code; the laws passed, the customs introduced and persisted
in, and the weight of the dominant classes all conspire to put the
stamp of morality on practices arising from the lowest and most
sordid aims. Thus did the trading class make a moral profession of
its methods of exploitation; it congratulated and sanctified itself
on its purity of life and its saving stability.
From this class--a class interpenetrated in every direction with
commercial frauds--was largely empanelled the men who sat on those
grand juries and petit juries solemnly passing verdict on the poor
wretches of criminals whom environment or poverty had driven into
crime. They were the arbiters of justice, but it was a justice that
was never allowed to act against themselves. Examine all the penal
codes of the period; note the laws proscribing long sentences in
prison for thefts of property; the larceny of even a suit of clothes
was severely punishable, and begging for alms was a misdemeanor. Then
contrast these asperities of law with the entire absence of adequate
protection for the buyer of merchandise. Following the old dictum of
Roman jurisprudence, "Let the buyer beware," the factory owner could
at will oppress his workers, and compel them, for the scantiest
wages, to make for his profit goods unfit for consumption. These
articles the retailer sold without scruple over his counter; when the
buyer was cheated or overcharged, as happened with great frequency,
he had practically no redress in law. If the merchant were robbed of
even ever so little he could retaliate by sending the guilty one to
prison. But the merchant himself could invidiously and continuously
rob the customer without fear of any law. All of this was converted
into a code of moralities; and any bold spirit who exposed its cant
and sham was denounced as an agitator and as an enemy of law and
order. [Footnote: A few progressive jurists in the International
Prison Congress are attempting to secure the recognition in law of
the principle that society, as a supreme necessity, is obligated to
protect its members from being made the victims of the cunning and
unscrupulous. They have received no encouragement, and will receive
none, from a trading class profiting from the very methods which it
is sought to place under the inhibition of criminal law.]
Vanderbilt did better than expose it; he improved upon, and enlarged,
it and made it a thing of magnitude; he and others of his quality
discarded petty larceny and ascended into a sphere of superlative
grand larceny. They knew with a cynical perception that society, with
all its pompous pretensions to morality, had evolved a rule which
worked with almost mathematical certainty. This rule was the
paradoxical, but nevertheless true, one that the greater the theft
the less corresponding danger there was of punishment.
THE WISDOM OF GRAND LARCENY.
Now it was that one could see with greater clearness than ever
before, how the mercenary ideal of the ruling class was working out
to its inevitable conclusion. Society had made money its god and
property its yardstick; even in its administration of justice,
theoretically supposed to be equal, it had made "justice" an
expensive luxury available, in actual practice, to the rich only. The
defrauder of large sums could, if prosecuted, use a part of that
plunder, easily engage a corps of shrewd, experienced lawyers, get
evidence manufactured, fight out the case on technicalities, drag it
along for years, call in political and social influence, and almost
invariably escape in the end.
But beyond this power of money to make a mockery of justice was a
still greater, though more subtle, factor, which was ever an
invaluable aid to the great thief. Every section of the trading class
was permeated with a profound admiration, often tangibly expressed,
for the craft that got away with an impressive pile of loot. The
contempt felt for the pickpocket was the antithesis of the general
mercantile admiring view of the man who stole in grand style,
especially when he was one of their own class. In speaking of the
piratical operations of this or that magnate, it was common to hear
many business men interject, even while denouncing him, "Well, I wish
I were as smart as he." These same men, when serving on juries, were
harsh in their verdicts on poor criminals, and unctuously flattered
themselves with being, and were represented as, the upholders and
conservers of law and moral conduct.
Departing from the main facts as this philosophical digression may
seem, it is essential for a number of reasons. One of these is the
continual necessity for keeping in mind a clear, balanced
perspective. Another lies in the need of presenting aright the
conditions in which Vanderbilt and magnates of his type were
produced. Their methods at basis were not a growth independent of
those of the business world and isolated from them. They were simply
a development, and not merely one of standards as applied to morals,
but of the mechanism of the social and industrial organization
itself. Finally it is advisable to give flashlight glimpses into the
modes and views of the time, inasmuch as it was in Vanderbilt's day
that the great struggle between the old principle of competition, as
upheld by the small capitalists, and the superseding one of
consolidation, as incarnated in him and others, took on vigorous
headway.
HE CONTINUES THE BUYING OF LAWS
Protest as it did against Vanderbilt's merging of railroads, the
middle class found itself quite helpless. In rapid succession he put
through one combination after another, and caused theft after theft
to be legalized, utterly disdainful of criticism or opposition. In
State after State he bought the repeal of old laws, or the passage of
new laws, until he was vested with authority to connect various
railroads that he had secured between Buffalo and Chicago, into one
line with nearly 1,300 miles of road. The commercial classes were
scared at the sight of such a great stretch of railroad--then
considered an immense line--in the hands of one man, audacious, all-
conquering, with power to enforce tribute at will. Again, Vanderbilt
patronized the printing presses, and many more millions of stock, all
fictitious capital, were added to the already flooded capital of the
Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad Company. Of the total of
$62,000,000 of capital stock in 1871, fully one-half was based upon
nothing but the certainty of making it valuable as a dividend payer
by the exaction of high freight and passenger rates. A little later,
the amount was run up to $73,000,000, and this was increased
subsequently.
Vanderbilt now had a complete railroad system from New York to
Chicago, with extensive offshoots. It is at this point that we have
to deal with a singular commendation of his methods thrust forward
glibly from that day to this. True, his eulogists admitted then, as
they admit now, Vanderbilt was not overscrupulous in getting property
that he wanted. But consider, they urge, the improvements he brought
about on the railroads that came into his possession; the renovation
of the roadbed, the institution of new locomotives and cars, the
tearing down of the old, worn-out stations. This has been the praise
showered upon him and his methods.
Inquiry, however, reveals that this appealing picture, like all
others of its sort, has been ingeniously distorted. The fact was, in
the first place, that these improvements were not made out of regard
to public convenience, but for two radically different reasons. The
first consideration was that if the dividends were to be paid on the
huge amount of fabricated stock, the road, of necessity, had to be
put into a condition of fair efficiency to meet or surpass the
competing facilities of other railroads running to Chicago. Second,
the number of damage claims for accident or loss of life arising
largely from improper appliances and insufficient safeguards, was so
great that it was held cheaper in the long run to spend millions for
improvements.
PUBLIC FUNDS FOR PRIVATE USE
Instead of paying for these improvements with even a few millions of
the proceeds of the watered stock, Vanderbilt (and all other railroad
magnates in like cases did the same) forced the public treasury to
defray a large part of the cost. A good illustration of his methods
was his improvement of his passenger terminus in New York City. The
entrance of the New York Central and the Harlem Railroads is by way
of Park (formerly Fourth) avenue. This franchise, as we have seen,
was obtained by bribery in 1832. But it was a qualified franchise. It
reserved certain nominal restrictions in behalf of the people by
inserting the right of the city to order the removal of the tracks at
any time that they became an obstruction. These terms were
objectionable to Vanderbilt; a perpetual franchise could be
capitalized for far more than a limited or qualified one. A perpetual
franchise was what he wanted.
The opportunity came in 1872. From the building of the railroad, the
tracks had been on the surface of Fourth avenue. Dozens of dangerous
crossings had resulted in much injury to life and many deaths. The
public demand that the tracks be depressed below the level of the
street had been resisted.
Instead of longer ignoring this demand, Vanderbilt now planned to
make use of it; he saw how he could utilize it not only to foist a
great part of the expense upon the city, but to get a perpetual
franchise. Thus, upon the strength of the popular cry for reform, he
would extort advantages calculated to save him millions and at the
same time extend his privileges. It was but another illustration of
the principle in capitalist society to which we have referred before
(and which there will be copious occasion to mention again and again)
that after energetically contesting even those petty reforms for
which the people have contended, the ruling classes have ever deftly
turned about when they could no longer withstand the popular demands,
and have made those very reforms the basis for more spoliation and
for a further intrenchment of their power. [Footnote: Commodore
Vanderbilt's descendants, the present Vanderbilts, have been using
the public outcry for a reform of conditions on the West Side of New
York City, precisely as the original Vanderbilt utilized that for the
improvement of Fourth avenue. The Hudson River division of the New
York Central and Hudson River Railroad has hitherto extended downtown
on the surface of Tenth and Eleventh Avenues and other thoroughfares.
Large numbers of people have been killed and injured. For decades
there has been a public demand that these dangerous conditions be
remedied or removed. The Vanderbilts have as long resisted the
demand; the immense numbers of casualties had no effect upon them.
When the public demand became too strong to be ignored longer, they
set about to exploit it in order to get a comprehensive franchise
with incalculable new privileges.]
The first step was to get the New York City Common Council to pass,
with an assumption of indignation, an ordinance requiring Vanderbilt
to make the desired improvements, and committing the city to bear
one-half the expense and giving him a perpetual franchise. This was
in Tweed's time when the Common Council was composed largely of the
most corrupt ward heelers, and when Tweed's puppet, Hall, was Mayor.
Public opposition to this grab was so great as to frighten the
politicians; at any rate, whatever his reasons, Mayor Hall vetoed the
ordinance.
Thereupon, in 1872, Vanderbilt went to the Legislature--that
Legislature whose members he had so often bought like so many cattle.
This particular Legislature, however, was elected in 1871, following
the revelations of the Tweed "ring" frauds. It was regarded as a
"model reform body." As has already been remarked in this work, the
pseudo "reform" officials or bodies elected by the American people in
the vain hope of overthrowing corruption, will often go to greater
lengths in the disposition of the people's rights and interests than
the most hardened politicians, because they are not suspected of
being corrupt, and their measures have the appearance of being
enacted for the public good. The Tweed clique had been broken up, but
the capitalists who had assiduously bribed its members and profited
so hugely from its political acts, were untouched and in greater
power than ever before. The source of all this corruption had not
been struck at in the slightest. Tweed, the politician, was
sacrificed and went to prison and died there; the capitalists who had
corrupted representative bodies everywhere in the United States,
before and during his time, were safe and respected, and in a
position to continue their work of corruption. Tweed made the
classic, unforgivable blunder of going into politics as a business,
instead of into commercialism. The very capitalists who had profited
so greatly by his corruption, were the first to express horror at his
acts.
From the "reform" Legislature of 1982 Vanderbilt secured all that he
sought. The act was so dexterously worded that while not nominally
giving a perpetual franchise, it practically revoked the qualified
parts of the charter of 1832. It also compassionately relieved him of
the necessity of having to pay out about $4,000,000, in replacing the
dangerous roadway, by imposing that cost upon New York City. Once
these improvements were made, Vanderbilt bonded them as though they
had been made with private money.
"REFORM" AS IT WORKS OUT.
But these were not his only gifts from the "reform" Legislature. The
Harlem Railroad owned, as we have seen, the Fourth avenue surface
line of horse cars. Although until this time it extended to Seventy-
ninth street only, this line was then the second most profitable in
New York City. In 1864, for instance, it carried nearly six million
passengers, and its gross earnings were $735,000. It did not pay, nor
was required to pay, a single cent in taxation. By 1872 the city's
population had grown to 950,000. Vanderbilt concluded that the time
was fruitful to gather in a few more miles of the public streets.
The Legislature was acquiescent. Chapter 325 of the Laws of 1872
allowed him to extend the line from Seventy-ninth street to as far
north as Madison avenue should thereafter be opened. "But see," said
the Legislature in effect, "how mindful of the public interests we
have been. We have imposed a tax of five per cent, on all gross
receipts above Seventy-ninth street." When, however, the time came to
collect, Vanderbilt innocently pretended that he had no means of
knowing whether the fares were taken in on that section of the line,
free of taxation, below Seventy-ninth street, or on the taxed portion
above it. Behind that fraudulent subterfuge the city officials have
never been inclined to go, nor have they made any effort. As a
consequence the only revenue that the city has since received from
that line has been a meager few thousand dollars a year.
At the very time that he was watering stock, sliding through
legislatures corrupt grants of perpetual franchises, and swindling
cities and States out of huge sums in taxes, [Footnote: Not alone he.
In a tabulated report made public on February 1, 1872, the New York
Council of Political Reform charged that in the single item of
surface railways, New York City for a long period had been swindled
annually out of at least a million dollars. This was an
underestimate. All other sections of the capitalist class swindled
likewise in taxes.] Vanderbilt was forcing the drivers and conductors
on the Fourth avenue surface line to work an average of fifteen hours
out of twenty-four, and reducing their daily wages from $2.25 to $2.
Vanderbilt made the pretense that it was necessary to economize; and,
as was the invariable rule of the capitalists, the entire burden of
the economizing process was thrown upon the already overloaded
workers. This subtraction of twenty-five cents a day entailed upon
the drivers and conductors and their families many severe
deprivations; working for such low wages every cent obviously counted
in the management of household affairs. But the methods of the
capitalist class in deliberately pyramiding its profits upon the
sufferings of the working class were evidenced in this case (as they
had been, and since have been, in countless other instances) by the
announcement in the Wall Street reports that this reduction in wages
was followed by an instant rise in the price of the stock of the
Fourth avenue surface line. The lower the wages, the greater the
dividends.
The further history of the Fourth avenue surface line cannot here be
pursued in detail. Suffice to say that the Vanderbilts, in 1894,
leased this line for 999 years to the Metropolitan Street Railway
Company, controlled by those eminent financiers, William C. Whitney
and others, whose monumental briberies, thefts and piracies have
frequently been uncovered in official investigations. For almost a
thousand years, unless a radical change of conditions comes, the
Vanderbilts will draw a princely revenue from the ownership of this
franchise alone.
It is not necessary to enter into a narrative of all the laws that
Vanderbilt bribed Legislature after Legislature, and Common Council
after Common Council, into passing--laws giving him for nothing
immensely valuable grants of land, shore rights and rights to land
under water, more authorizations to make further consolidations and
to issue more watered stock. Nor is it necessary to deal with the
numerous bills he considered adverse to his interests, that he caused
to be smothered in legislative committees by bribery.
VANDERBILT'S CHIEF OF STAFF
His chief instrument during all those years was a general utility
lawyer, Chauncey M. Depew, whose specialty was to hoodwink the public
by grandiloquent exhibitions of mellifluent spread-eagle oratory,
while bringing the "proper arguments" to bear upon legislators and
other public officials. [Footnote: Roscoe Conkling, a noted
Republican politician, said of him: "Chauncey Depew? Oh, you mean the
man that Vanderbilt sends to Albany every winter to say 'haw' and
'gee' to his cattle up there."] Every one who could in any way be
used, or whose influence required subsidizing, was, in the phrase of
the day, "taken care of." Great sums of money were distributed
outright in bribes in the legislatures by lobbyists in Vanderbilt's
pay. Supplementing this, an even more insidious system of bribery was
carried on. Free passes for railroad travel were lavishly
distributed; no politician was ever refused; newspaper and magazine
editors, writers and reporters were always supplied with free
transportation for the asking, thus insuring to a great measure their
good will, and putting them under obligations not to criticise or
expose plundering schemes or individuals. All railroad companies used
this form, as well as other forms, of bribery.
It was mainly by means of the free pass system that Depew, acting for
the Vanderbilts, secured not only a general immunity from newspaper
criticism, but continued to have himself and them portrayed in
luridly favorable lights. Depending upon the newspapers for its
sources of information, the public was constantly deceived and
blinded, either by the suppression of certain news, or by its being
tampered with and grossly colored. This Depew continued as the
wriggling tool of the Vanderbilt family for nearly half a century.
Astonishing as it may seem, he managed to pass among the uninformed
as a notable man; he was continuously eulogized; at one time he was
boomed for the nomination for President of the United States, and in
1905 when the Vanderbilt family decided to have a direct
representative in the United States Senate, they ordered the New York
State Legislature, which they practically owned, to elect him to that
body. It was while he was a United States Senator that the
investigations, in 1905, of a committee of the New York Legislature
into the affairs of certain life insurance companies revealed that
Depew had long since been an advisory party to the gigantic swindles
and briberies carried on by Hyde, the founder and head of the
Equitable Life Assurance Society.
The career of Depew is of no interest to posterity, excepting in so
far as it shows anew how the magnates were able to use intermediaries
to do their underground work for them, and to put those
intermediaries into the highest official positions in the country.
This fact alone was responsible for their elevation to such bodies as
the United States Senate, the President's Cabinet and the courts.
Their long service as lobbyists or as retainers was the surest
passport to high political or judicial position; their express duty
was to vote or decide as their masters' interest bid them. So it was
(as it is now) that men who had bribed right and left, and who had
put their cunning or brains at the complete disposal of the magnates,
filled Congress and the courts. These were, to a large extent, the
officials by whose votes or decisions all measures of value to the
working class were defeated; and reversely, by whose actions all or
nearly all bills demanded by the money interests, were passed and
sustained.
Here we are again forced to notice the truism thrusting itself
forward so often and conspicuously; that law was essentially made by
the great criminals of society, and that, thus far it has been a
frightful instrument, based upon force, for legalizing theft on a
large scale. By law the great criminals absolve themselves and at the
same time declare drastic punishment for the petty criminals. The
property obtained by theft is converted into a sacred vested
institution; the men who commit the theft or their hirelings sit in
high places, and pass laws surrounding the proceeds of that theft
with impregnable fortifications of statutes; should any poor devil,
goaded on by the exasperations of poverty, venture to help himself to
even the tiniest part of that property, the severest penalty, enacted
by those same plunderers, is mercilessly visited upon him.
After having bribed legislatures to legalize his enormous issue of
watered stock, what was Vanderbilt's next move? The usual fraudulent
one of securing exemption from taxation. He and other railroad owners
sneaked through law after law by which many of their issues of stock
were made non-taxable.
So now old shaggy Vanderbilt loomed up the richest magnate in the
United States. His ambition was consummated; what mattered it to him
that his fortune was begot in blackmail and extortion, bribery and
theft? Now that he had his hundred millions he had the means to
demand adulation and the semblance of respect, if not respect itself.
The commercial world admired, even while it opposed, him; in his
methods it saw at bottom the abler application and extension of its
own, and while it felt aggrieved at its own declining importance and
power, it rendered homage in the awed, reverential manner in which it
viewed his huge fortune.
Over and over again, even to the point of wearisome repetition, must
it be shown, both for the sake of true historical understanding and
in justice to the founders of the great fortunes, that all mercantile
society was permeated with fraud and subsisted by fraud. But the
prevalence of this fraud did not argue its practitioners to be
inherently evil. They were victims of a system inexorably certain to
arouse despicable qualities. The memorable difference between the two
classes was that the workers, as the sufferers, were keenly alive to
the abominations of the system, while the capitalists not only
insisted upon the right to benefit from its continuance, but harshly
sought to repress every attempt of the workers to agitate for its
modification or overthrow.
REPRESSION BY STARVATION.
These repressive tactics took on a variety of forms, some of which
are not ordinarily included in the definitions of repression.
The usual method was that of subsidizing press and pulpit in certain
subtle ways. By these means facts were concealed or distorted, a
prejudicial state of public opinion created, and plausible grounds
given for hostile interference by the State. But a far more powerful
engine of repression was the coercion exercised by employers in
forcing their workers to remain submissive on instant peril of losing
their jobs. While, at that time, manufacturers, jobbers and
shopkeepers throughout the country were rising in angry protest
against the accumulation of plundering power in the hands of such men
as Vanderbilt, Gould and Huntington, they were themselves exploiting
and bribing on a widespread scale. Their great pose was that of a
thorough commercial respectability; it was in this garb that they
piously went to legislatures and demanded investigations into the
rascally methods of the railroad magnates. The facts, said they,
should be made public, so as to base on them appropriate legislation
which would curtail the power of such autocrats. Contrasted with the
baseness and hypocrisy of the trading class, Vanderbilt's qualities
of brutal candor and selfishness shine out as brilliant virtues.
[Footnote: No observation could be truer. As a class, the
manufacturers were flourishing on stolen inventions. There might be
exceptions, but they were very rare. Year after year, decade after
decade, the reports of the various Commissioners of Patents pointed
out the indiscriminate theft of inventions by the capitalists. In
previous chapters we have referred to the plundering of Whitney and
Goodyear. But they were only two of a vast number of inventors
similarly defrauded.
In speaking of the helplessness of inventors, J. Holt, Commissioner
of Patents, wrote in his Annual Report for 1857: "The insolence and
unscrupulousness of capital, subsidizing and leading on its minions
in the work of pirating some valuable invention held by powerless
hands, can scarcely by conceived by those not familiar with the
records of such cases as I have referred to. Inventors, however
gifted in other respects, are known to be confiding and thriftless;
and being generally without wealth, and always without knowledge of
the chicaneries of law, they too often prove but children in those
rude conflicts which they are called on to endure with the stalwart
fraud and cunning of the world." (U. S. Senate Documents, First
Session, Thirty-fifth Congress, 1857-58, viii: 9-10). In his Annual
Report for 1858, Commissioner Holt described how inventors were at
the mercy of professional perjurers whom the capitalists hired to
give evidence.
The bribing of Patent office officials was a common occurrence. "The
attention of Congress," reported Commissioner of Patents Charles
Mason in 1854, "is invited to the importance of providing some
adequate means of preventing attempts to obtain patents by improper
means." Several cases of "attempted bribery" had occurred within the
year, stated Commissioner Mason. (Executive Documents, First Session,
Thirty-third Congress, 1853-54, Vol. vii, Part I: 19-20.) Every
successive Commissioner of Patents called upon Congress to pass laws
for the prevention of fraud, and for the better protection of the
inventor, but Congress, influenced by the manufacturers, was deaf to
these appeals.]
These same manufacturers objected in the most indignant manner, as
they similarly do now, to any legislative investigations of their own
methods. Eager to have the practices of Vanderbilt and Gould probed
into, they were acrimoniously opposed to even criticism of their
factory system. For this extreme sensitiveness there was the amplest
reason. The cruelties of the factory system transcended belief. In,
for instance, the State of Massachusetts, vaunting itself for its
progressiveness, enlightenment and culture, the textile factories
were a horror beyond description. The Convention of the Boston Eight
Hour League, in 1872, did not overstate when it declared of the
factory system that "it employs tens of thousands of women and
children eleven and twelve hours a day; owns or controls in its own
selfish interest the pulpit and the press; prevents the operative
classes from making themselves felt in behalf of less hours, through
remorseless exercise of the power of discharge; and is rearing a
population of children and youth of sickly appearance and scanty or
utterly neglected schooling."...
As the factory system was in Massachusetts, so it was elsewhere. Any
employee venturing to agitate for better conditions was instantly
discharged; spies were at all times busy among the workers; and if a
labor union were formed, the factory owners would obtain sneak
emissaries into it, with orders to report on every move and disrupt
the union if possible. The factory capitalists in Massachusetts, New
York, Illinois and every other manufacturing State were determined to
keep up their system unchanged, because it was profitable to work
children eleven and a half hours a day in a temperature that in
summer often reached 108 degrees and in an atmosphere certain to
breed immorality; [Footnote: "Certain to breed immorality." See
report of Carrol D. Wright, Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of
Labor, 1881. A cotton mill operative testified: "Young girls from
fourteen and upward learn more wickedness in one year than they would
in five out of a mill." See also the numerous recent reports of the
National Child Labor Committee.] it was profitable to compel adult
men and women having families to work for an average of ninety cents
a day; it was profitable to avoid spending money in equipping their
factories with life-saving apparatus. Hence these factory owners,
forming the aristocracy of trade, savagely fought every move or law
that might expose or alter those conditions; the annals of
legislative proceedings are full of evidences of bribery.
Having no illusions, and being a severely practical man, Vanderbilt
well knew the pretensions of this trading class; with many a cynical
remark, aptly epitomizing the point, he often made sport of their
assumptions. He knew (and none knew better) that they had dived deep
in bribery and fraud; they were the fine gentlemen, he well recalled,
who had generally obtained patents by fraud; who had so often bribed
members of Congress to vote for a high tariff; the same, too, who had
bribed legislatures for charters, water rights, exemptions from
taxation, the right to work employees as long as, and under whatever
conditions, they wanted to. This manufacturing aristocracy professed
to look down upon Vanderbilt socially as a coarse sharper; and in New
York a certain ruling social element, the native aristocracy,
composed of old families whose wealth, originating in fraud, had
become respectable by age, took no pains to conceal their opinion of
him as a parvenu, and drew about their sacred persons an amusing
circle of exclusiveness into the rare precincts of which he might not
enter.
Vanderbilt now proceeded to buy social and religious grace as he had
bought laws. The purchase of absolution has ever been a convenient
and cheap method of obtaining society's condonation of theft. In
medieval centuries it took a religious form; it has become transposed
to a social traffic in these superior days. Let a man steal in
colossal ways and then surrender a small part of it in charitable,
religious and educational donations; he at once ceases being a thief
and straightway becomes a noble benefactor. Vanderbilt now shed his
life-long irreverence, and gave to Deems, a minister of the
Presbyterian Church, as a gift, the Church of the Strangers on Mercer
street, and he donated $1,000,000 for the founding of the Vanderbilt
University at Nashville, Tenn. The press, the church and the
educational world thereupon upon hailed him as a marvel of saintly
charity and liberality.
THE SERMONIZING OF THE "BEST CLASSES."
One section of the social organization declined to accept the views
of the class above it. This was the working class. Superimposed upon
the working class, draining the life blood of the workers to provide
them with wealth, luxuries and power, were those upper strata of
society known as the "best classes." These "best classes," with a
monstrous presumption, airily proclaimed their superiority and
incessantly harped upon the need of elevating and regenerating the
masses.
And who, it may be curiously asked, were the classes self destined or
self selected to do this regenerating? The commercial and financial
element, with its peculiar morals so adjusted to its interests, that
it saw nothing wrong in the conditions by which it reaped its wealth
--conditions that made slaves of the workers, threw them into
degradation and poverty, drove multitudes of girls and women into
prostitution, and made the industrial field an immense concourse of
tears, agony and carnage. Hanging on to this supreme class of wealth,
fawning to it, licking its very feet, were the parasites and
advocates of the press, law, politics, the pulpit, and, with a few
exceptions, of the professional occupations. These were the
instructors who were to teach the working class what morals were;
these were the eminences under whose guidance the working class was
to be uplifted!
Let us turn from this sickening picture of sordid arrogance and
ignorance so historically true of all aristocracies based upon money,
from the remotest time to this present day, and contemplate how the
organized part of the working class regarded the morals of its
"superiors."
While the commercial class, on the one hand, was determined on
beating down the working class at every point, it was, on the other,
unceasingly warring among itself. In business dealings there was no
such recognized thing as friendship. To get the better of the other
was held the quintessence of mercantile shrewdness. A flint-hard,
brute spirit enveloped all business transactions. The business man
who lost his fortune was generally looked upon without emotion or
pity, and condemned as an incapable. For self interest, business men
began to combine in corporations, but these were based purely upon
mercenary aims. Not a microscopic trace was visible of that spirit of
fellow kindness, sympathy, collective concern and brotherhood already
far developed among the organized part of the working class.
As the supereminent magnate of his day, Vanderbilt was invested with
extraordinary publicity; he was extensively interviewed and quoted;
his wars upon rival capitalists were matters of engrossing public
concern; his slightest illness was breathlessly followed by
commercialdom dom and its outcome awaited. Hosts of men, women and
children perished every year of disease contracted in factories,
mines and slums; but Vanderbilt's least ailment was given a
transcending importance, while the scourging sweep of death among the
lowly and helpless was utterly ignored.
Precisely as mercantile society bestowed no attention upon the
crushed and slain, except to advance roughshod over their stricken
bodies while throwing out a pittance in charity here and there, so
Vanderbilt embodied in himself the qualities that capitalist society
in mass practiced and glorified. "It was strong men," says Croffut,
"whom he liked and sympathized with, not weak ones; the self-reliant,
not the helpless. He felt that the solicitor of charity was always a
lazy or drunken person, trying to live by plundering the sober and
industrious." This malign distrust of fellow beings, this acrid
cynicism of motives, this extraordinary imputation of evil designs on
the part of the penniless, was characteristic of the capitalist class
as a whole. Itself practicing the lowest and most ignoble methods,
governed by the basest motives, plundering in every direction, it
viewed every member of its own class with suspicion and rapacity.
Then it turned about, and with immense airs of superiority,
attributed all of its own vices and crimes to the impoverished masses
which its own system had created, whether in America or elsewhere.
The apologist may hasten forward with the explanation that the
commercial class was not to be judged by Vanderbilt's methods and
qualities. In truth, however, Vanderbilt was not more inhuman than
many of the contemporary shining lights of the business world.
"HONESTY AND INDUSTRY" ANALYZED.
If there is any one fortune commonly praised as having been acquired
"by honesty and industry," it is the Borden millions, made from
cotton factories. At the time Vanderbilt was blackmailing, the
founder of this fortune, Colonel Borden, was running cotton mills in
Fall River. His factory operatives worked from five o'clock in the
morning to seven in the evening, with but two half hours of
intermission, one for breakfast, the other for dinner. The workday of
these men, women and children was thus thirteen hours; their wages
were wretchedly low, their life was one of actual slavery.
Insufficient nourishment, overwork, and the unsanitary and disgusting
conditions in the mills, prematurely aged and debilitated them, and
were a constant source of disease, killing off considerable numbers,
especially the children.
In 1850, the operatives asked Borden for better wages and shorter
hours. This was his reply: "I saw that mill built stone by stone; I
saw the pickers, the carding engines, the spinning mules and the
looms put into it, one after the other, and I would see every machine
and stone crumble and fall to the floor again before I would accede
to your wishes." Borden would not have been amiss had he added that
every stone in that mill was cemented with human blood. His
operatives went on a strike, stayed out ten months, suffered
frightful hardships, and then were forced back to their tasks by
hunger. Borden was inflexible, and so were all the other cotton mill
owners. [Footnote: The heroism of the cotton operatives was
extraordinary. Slaves themselves, they battled to exterminate negro
slavery. "The spinner's union," says McNeill, "was almost dead during
the [Civil] war, as most of its members had gone to shoulder the
musket and to fight... to strike the shackles from the negro. A large
number were slain in battle."-"The Labor Movement": 216-217.] It was
not until 1874, after many further bitterly-contested strikes, that
the Masachusetts Legislature was prevailed upon to pass a ten-hour
law, twenty-four years after the British Parliament had passed such
an enactment.
The commercial class, high and low, was impregnated with deceit and
dissimulation, cynicism, selfishness and cruelty. What were the
aspirations of the working class which it was to uplift? The contrast
stood out with stark distinctness. While business men were
frantically sapping the labor and life out of their workers, and then
tricking and cheating one another to seize the proceeds of that
exploitation, the labor unions were teaching the nobility of
brotherly cooperation. "Cultivate friendship among the great
brotherhood of toil," was the advice of Uriah Stevens, master workman
of the Knights of Labor, at the annual meeting of that organization
on January 12, 1871. And he went on:
And while the toiler is thus engaged in creating the world's value,
how fares his own interest and well-being? We answer, "Badly," for he
has too little time, and his faculties become too much blunted by
unremitting labor to analyze his condition or devise and perfect
financial schemes or reformatory measures. The hours of labor are too
long, and should be shortened. I recommend a universal movement to
cease work at five o'clock Saturday afternoon, as a beginning. There
should be a greater participation in the profits of labor by the
industrious and intelligent laborer. In the present arrangements of
labor and capital, the condition of the employee is simply that of
wage slavery--capital dictating, labor submitting; capital superior,
labor inferior.
This is an artificial and man-created condition, not God's
arrangement and order; for it degrades man and ennobles mere pelf. It
demeans those who live by useful labor, and, in proportion, exalts
all those who eschew labor and live (no matter by what pretence or
respectable cheat--for cheat it is) without productive work.
LABOR'S PRINCIPLES IGNORED.
Such principles as these evoked so little attention that it is
impossible to find them recorded in most of the newspapers of the
time; and if mentioned it was merely as the object of venomous
attacks. In varying degrees, now in outright abuse and again in
sneering and ridicule, the working class was held up as an ignorant,
discontented, violent aggregation, led by dangerous agitators, and
arrogantly seeking to upset all business by seeking to dictate to
employers what wages and hours of labor should be.
And, after all, little it mattered to the capitalists what the
workers thought or said, so long as the machinery of government was
not in their hands. At about the very time Master Workman Stevens was
voicing the unrest of the laboring masses, and at the identical time
when the panic of 1873 saw several millions of men workless, thrown
upon soup kitchens and other forms of charity, and battered wantonly
by policemen's clubs when they attempted to hold mass meetings of
protest, an Iowa writer, D. C. Cloud, was issuing a work which showed
concretely how thoroughly Government was owned by the commercial and
financial classes. This work, obscurely published and now scarcely
known except to the patient delver, is nevertheless one of the few
serious books on prevailing conditions written at that time, and is
in marked contrast to the reams of printed nonsense then circulated.
Although Cloud was tinged greatly with the middle class point of
view, and did not see that all successful business was based upon
deceit and fraud, yet so far as his lights carried him, he wrote
trenchantly and fearlessly, embodying series after series of facts
exposing the existing system. He observed:
... A measure without any merit save to advance the interest of a
patentee, or contractor, or railroad company, will become a law,
while measures of interest to the whole people are suffered to
slumber, and die at the close of the session from sheer neglect. It
is known to Congressmen that these lobbyists are paid to influence
legislation by the parties interested, and that dishonest and corrupt
means are resorted to for the accomplishment of the object they have
undertaken ... Not one interest in the country nor all other
interests combined are as powerful as the railroad interest ... With
a network of roads throughout the country; with a large capital at
command; with an organization perfect in all its parts, controlled by
a few leading spirits like Scott, Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, Tracy and a
dozen others, the whole strength and wealth of this corporate power
can be put into operation at any moment, and Congressmen are bought
and sold by it like any article of merchandise. [Footnote:
"Monopolies and the People:" 155-156.]