SUCCESS
i
The ready explanation of Galt’s rise in a few years to the rôle of Wall
Street monarch is that he was a master profit maker. The way of it
was phenomenal. His touch was that of genius, daring, unaccountable,
mysteriously guided by an inner mentality. And when the results
appeared they were so natural, inevitable, that men wondered no less at
their own stupidity than at his prescience. Why had they not seen the
same opportunity?
His associates made money by no effort of their own. They had only
to put their talents with the mighty steward. He took them, employed
them as he pleased, and presently returned them two-fold, five-fold,
sometimes twenty-fold.
But this explanation only begs the secret. The nature of his unique
power is still hidden. It was in the first manifestation a power
to persuade men. It became a power to command them, in virtue of
the ability he had to reward them. This ability was the consummate
power,--a power to imagine and create wealth. As it grew and as the
respect for it became a superstition among his associates and a terror
to all adversaries he passed into the dictatorial phase of his career.
Mordecai’s thought,--“Id iss only zat ve zhall manage him a
liddle,”--was rudely shattered. He was unmanageable. He gave Mordecai
& Co. peremptory orders, and they were obeyed, as they well might be,
since Galt’s star had lifted the house of Mordecai from third to first
rank in the financial world. It had become richer and more powerful
than any other house in Wall Street save one and that one was its
ancient enemy.
Mordecai’s courage had fainting fits. To “zese heights” he was often
unable to follow without a good deal of forcible assistance. Frequently
he would come to wrestle prayerfully with Galt, begging him in vain to
scale down some particularly audacious plan, whatever it was. One day
they had been at this for an hour. Galt was pugnacious and oppressive.
They stood up to it. Mordecai, retreating step by step, had come to bay
in a corner, gazing upward, the tips of his fingers together; Galt was
passing to and fro in front of him, laying down his will, stopping now
and then to emphasize the point by shaking his fist under Mordecai’s
nose.
Just then the boy from the reception room came to my desk with the
name of Horace Potter. That was awkward. Potter was a tempestuous
man, easily moved to high anger, himself an autocrat, unaccustomed
to wait upon the pleasure of others. He was personally one of Galt’s
most powerful supporters and brought to him besides the whole
strength of the puissant oil crowd, which controlled at that time
more available wealth than any other group in Wall Street. It was an
unusual concession for him to call upon anyone. People always came to
him. And there he was outside, waiting. He had come to keep a definite
appointment. There was no excuse. I tried to tell Galt, but he waved me
away fiercely.
“Don’t bother me now, Coxey.”
Five minutes passed. Of a sudden Potter bolted in. “What is this?” he
roared. “Am I one to cool my heels in your outer office?”
Galt turned round and stared at him, blankly at first and then with
blazing anger.
“How did you get in here?” he asked.
“By God, I walked in,” said Potter.
“Then, by God, walk out again,” said Galt, turning his back.
I followed him out, thinking to find some mollifying word to say; he
was unapproachable. The reception room was empty but for Potter and
the friend he had with him, an important banker who was to have been
presented to Galt in a special way. They talked with no heed of me.
“He’s in one of his damned tantrums,” said Potter. “We’ll have to chuck
it or try again.”
The other man got very red.
“Why do you stand it?” he asked. “You!”
“I’ll tell you why,” said Potter. “We make more with him than with any
other man who ever handled our money. That’s a very good reason.”
“I couldn’t help it,” I said to Galt, afterward.
“All right,” he said. “He won’t do it again.”
He never did. And so one by one they learned to take him as he was, to
swallow their pride and submit to his moods, all for the same reason.
He had the power to make them rich, richer, richest.
A meeting of the board of directors became a perfunctory formality,
serving only to verify and approve Galt’s acts for purposes of record.
On his own responsibility he committed the company to policies,
investments, vast undertakings, and informed the board later. Success
was his whole justification. If once that failed him his authority
would collapse instantly.
In a rare moment of self-inspection, after one of his darling visions
had come true, he said:
“After all, Coxey, it’s the Lord makes the tide rise. We don’t control
it. We only ride it.”
It was an amazing tide. Never was one like it before. It floated old
hulks that had been lying helpless and bankrupt on the sands for years.
And when men began to say it was high enough, that it was time to
prepare for the ebb, Galt said it was yet beginning. On the day Great
Midwestern stock sold at one hundred dollars a share,--par!--he said to
Mordecai: “That’s nothing. It will sell at two hundred. Buy me twenty
thousand shares at this price.”
“I belief you, Mr. Gald,” said Mordecai in an awe-struck whisper.
ii
Proceeds of the incessant enormous issues of new securities had been
invested first in the reconstruction of the Great Midwestern itself
and then in the shares of other railroads, beginning with the Orient
& Pacific. That was the first of a series of transactions. We now
owned outright or controlled by stock ownership no fewer than fifteen
other railroad properties, besides lake and ocean steamship lines,
docks, terminals, belt lines, trolley systems, forests, oil fields
and coal mines. The Great Midwestern was the vertebra of an organism,
ramifying east, west, north and south; it reached from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, with antennæ to Asia and Europe. Its treasury was
inexhaustible, fed by so many streams.
Not only did our own earnings increase amazingly as all those other
properties poured their traffic into us, but the Great Midwestern
treasury received dividends on the shares by which it controlled
those traffic bringers. Thus we garnered twice. There was yet a third
source of profit. As the Great Midwestern acquired new properties Galt
rebuilt them out of their own earnings or by use of their own credit,
so that their value increased. Thus, they brought us traffic, they
paid dividends into our treasury and at the same time they were so
enhanced in physical value by Galt’s methods of development that they
were soon worth three or four times what they had cost. All this was
in each case so obvious, once it had happened, and yet so remarkable
in the aggregate, that people could scarcely believe it. A writer in
one of the financial papers exclaimed: “If these figures are true,
then the Great Midwestern Railway Company could go out of the railroad
business entirely and live richly on the profits that appear from its
investments in the securities of other railroads.”
And the figures _were_ true.
iii
Galt’s name rose to impersonal eminence. The properties embraced in
the Great Midwestern organism were referred to as Galt properties.
Their securities were Galt bonds or Galt stocks. The acts of the
Great Midwestern were not its own; they were Galt’s. There was a Galt
influence which reached beyond his own domain. Once an important
railroad system in which neither he nor the Great Midwestern had any
direct interest was about to reduce its rate of dividend. The directors
on their way to the meeting said they would vote to reduce it. But they
didn’t. When the meeting was over they were asked why they had changed
their minds. The explanation was that Galt had sent word to them that
he wished them not to do it. He said it would be a shock to public
confidence, and that he would divert enough traffic to the road to
enable it to earn the dividend it had been paying. And presently Wall
Street people were talking of a Galt crowd or a Galt party, meaning all
that group of men associated with him in his undertakings.
The magazines discovered him. For a long time he would not be
interviewed. There was nothing to talk about, he said; why did they
pester him? They wrote articles about him, notwithstanding, because
he was a new power in the land, and so much of the information they
put forth was garbled or immature that he was persuaded at last to
submit to a regular interview. The writer assigned to the task was
at that time a famous interviewer. He came one evening to the house
by appointment and waited in the great drawing room. I was with him,
giving him some advice, when Galt came in, wearing slippers the heels
of which slapped the floor at every step. He sat in a large chair,
crouched himself, stared for a full minute at the interviewer through
large shell spectacles, justifying, I afterward remembered, the
interviewer’s impression of him as a huge, predatory, not unfriendly
spider. Suddenly he spoke, saying:
“Ain’t you ashamed to be in this business?”
“Everybody has something to be ashamed of,” said the interviewer. “What
are you ashamed of?”
That pleased Galt. He loved a straight hit on the nose. And it turned
out to be a very successful interview.
What the public knew about him was already enough to dazzle the
imagination. What it didn’t know, not yet at least, was more
surprising. His private fortune became so great that he was obliged
to think what to do with it. Unerringly he employed it in means to
greater power. Hitherto he had relied mainly upon the support of
individuals and groups of men who put their money with him. Now he
began on his own account to buy heavily into financial institutions and
before anybody knew what he was doing he had got working control of
several great reservoirs of liquid capital, such as chartered banks and
insurance companies. The use of this was that he could influence them
to invest their funds in the securities of the Great Midwestern and
its collateral properties. That made it easier for him to sell the new
stocks and bonds which he was endlessly creating to provide money for
his projects.
His passion to build burned higher and higher. Any spectacle of
construction fascinated him. We stood for an hour one morning at the
corner of Broadway and Exchange Place watching a new way of putting
down the foundation for a steel building. Wooden caissons were sunk in
the ground by a pneumatic principle to a great depth and then filled
with concrete. The building was to be twenty stories high.
“Have you noticed,” I asked him, “how the skyline of New York has
changed since steel construction began? If you haven’t seen it from
down the bay or across the river for several years you wouldn’t know
it.”
“I haven’t,” he said. “Yes ... of course. It must be so.”
An hour later in the office he called me to the window. “See that
handful of old brick rookeries down there?... Fine place to build....
Let’s do something for your skyline.”
In his mind’s eye was the mirage of a skyscraper thirty stories tall
with the Great Midwestern’s executive offices luxuriously established
on the top floors. A year later it was there, and we were there.
Most men are superstitious about leaving the environment in which
success has been bearded and made docile. Was he? I never quite knew.
All this time we had remained in those dark, awkward old offices with
their funny walnut furniture. Not a desk had been changed. A new rug
was bought for the president’s room when Valentine left and Galt moved
in; and Harbinger, restored to the room Galt had moved him out of,
asked for some new linoleum on the floor. Nothing else had been done to
improve our quarters. Where Cæsar sits, there his empire is. What he
sits on does not matter at all.
His last act in this setting was dramatic. Word came one Saturday
morning that the dæmonic Missouri River was on a wild rampage, with a
sudden mind to change its way. Three towns that lay in its path were
waiting helplessly to be devoured, and there was no telling what would
happen after that. The government’s engineers were frantic, calling
for help, with no idea where it was to come from. Galt got Chicago on
the wire and spoke to the chief of his engineer corps, a man to whom
mountains were technical obstacles and rivers a petty nuisance.
“The Missouri River is cavorting around again,” said Galt. “Now,
listen.... Yes!... Take everything we’ve got, men, materials and
equipment--hello!--anything you need, including the right of way. I
don’t care what it costs, but put a ring in her nose and lead her back
to her trough. This order is unlimited. It takes precedence over mail,
business and acts of Providence. Go like hell.... Hello!... That’s all.”
Then he walked out for the last time and never once looked back. On
Monday morning he walked into our ornate new offices without appearing
to notice them. He was impatient for something that should be on his
desk. It was there,--a message from the engineer:
“Will have her stopped by 6 p. m., Monday. Get her back to bed in a few
days.”
It was a memorable feat, a triumph of daring and skill, and cost the
Great Midwestern several millions of dollars.
iv
At about this time, quite accidentally, there shaped in his thoughts
that ultimate project which lies somewhere near the heart of every
instinctive builder. One evening at dinner Natalie said: “I wonder why
we have no country place? Everyone else has.”
Galt stopped eating and looked at her slowly.
“Why of course, that’s it,” he said. “I’ve been wondering what it was
we didn’t have, ... looking at it all the time, like the man at the
giraffe.... Huh!”
He approached it in a characteristic manner at once. There was
somewhere a topographic map of New Jersey. It was searched for and
found and he and Natalie lay on the floor with their heads together
exploring it. First he explained to her how one got the elevations by
following the brown contour lines and what the signs and figures meant.
“Then this must be a mountain,” she exclaimed.
“Right,” he said. “You get the idea. Here’s a better one. Look here.”
“Oh, but see this one,” she said. “Look! All by itself.”
He examined her discovery thoughtfully. It was a mountain in northern
New Jersey, the tallest one, two small rivers flowing at its feet, a
view unobstructed in all directions.
“You’ve found the button,” he said. “I believe you have ... wild
country ... not much built up.... What’s that railroad, can you see?...
All right. We can get anything at all we want from them.”
The whole family went the next day on a voyage of verification and
discovery. It was all they had hoped for. Natalie was ecstatic in
the rôle of Columbus. Fancy! She had found it on a map, no bigger
than that!--and here it was. Mrs. Galt was acquiescent and a little
bewildered. Vera was conservative. They imagined a large house on top
of the mountain, with a road up, more or less following the trail they
had ascended to get the view, which took the breath out of you, Natalie
said. You could see the Hudson River for many miles up, New York City,
the Catskills possibly on a very clear day,--most of the world, in
fact. Mrs. Galt and Vera perceived the difficulties and had no sense of
how they were to be overcome. Galt imagined an estate of fifty thousand
acres of which this mountain should be the paramount feature; miles of
concrete roads, a power dam and electric light plant large enough to
serve a town, a branch railroad to the base of the mountain, a private
station to be named Galt, and finally,--the most impossible thing he
could conceive,--a swift electric elevator up the mountain.
The business of acquiring the land began at once. The mountain itself
was easy to buy. Many old farm holders in the valley were obstinate.
But he got the heart of what he wanted to begin with, the rest would
come in time, and construction plans of great magnitude were soon under
way. The house in Fifth Avenue was in one sense a failure. It had not
reduced Mrs. Valentine. It only made her worse. The social feud was
unending. Well, now he would show them a country place.
And this, though he knew it not, was to be his castle on a hill,
inaccessible and grand, a place of refuge, the feudal, immemorial
symbol of power and conquest.