Cornelius Vanderbilt Famous Quotes

One of the most notorious of these was Cornelius Vanderbilt, who famously remarked, “What do I care about the Law? Hain’t I got the power?

Only a stock that many traders were selling short could be cornered; a stock that was in the throes of a real bear raid was ideal. In the latter situation, the would-be cornerer would attempt to buy up the investment houses’ floating supply of the stock and enough of the privately held shares to freeze out the bears; if the attempt succeeded, when he called for the short sellers to make good the stock they had borrowed, they could buy it from no one but him. And they would have to buy it at any price he chose to ask, their only alternatives—at least theoretically—being to go into bankruptcy or to jail for failure to meet their obligations. In the old days of titanic financial death struggles, when Adam Smith’s ghost still smiled on Wall Street, corners were fairly common and were often extremely sanguinary, with hundreds of innocent bystanders, as well as the embattled principals, getting their financial heads lopped off. The most famous cornerer in history was that celebrated old pirate, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who engineered no less than three successful corners during the eighteen-sixties. Probably his classic job was in the stock of the Harlem Railway. By dint of secretly buying up all its available shares while simultaneously circulating a series of untruthful rumors of imminent bankruptcy to lure the short sellers in, he achieved an airtight trap. Finally, with the air of a man doing them a favor by saving them from jail, he offered the cornered shorts at $179 a share the stock he had bought up at a small fraction of that figure.

Cornelius Jeremiah, the second son, proved an embarrassment almost from the beginning, a point the Commodore never let him forget. He suffered from epilepsy, which his father took to be a mental illness and a mark of weakness. A failure in several different business ventures, Cornie, as he was known, repeatedly leaned on his famous last name to procure loans and lines of credit, which he then squandered by gambling. Twice the Commodore had him committed to what were then called “lunatic asylums,” and when those institutions proved unable to prevent financial and moral laxity, the Commodore resorted to warning friends and business associates away from him. “There is a crazy fellow running all over the land calling himself my son,” the Commodore was quoted as saying. “If you come into contact with him, don’t trust him.