Railroad Tycoon Quotes

The charge of heartlessness, epitomized in the remark that William H. Vanderbilt, a railroad tycoon, is said to have made to an inquiring reporter, "The public be damned," is belied by the flowering of charitable activity in the United States in the nineteenth century. Privately financed schools and colleges multiplied; foreign missionary activity exploded; nonprofit private hospitals, orphanages, and numerous other institutions sprang up like weeds. Almost every charitable or public service organization, from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to the YMCA and YWCA, from the Indian Rights Association to the Salvation Army, dates from that period. Voluntary cooperation is no less effective in organizing charitable activity than in organizing production for profit. The charitable activity was matched by a burst of cultural activity—art museums, opera houses, symphonies, museums, public libraries arose in big cities and frontier towns alike. The size of government spending is one measure of government's role. Major wars aside, government spending from 1800 to 1929 did not exceed about 12 percent of the national income. Two-thirds of that was spent by state and local governments, mostly for schools and roads. As late as 1928, federal government spending amounted to about 3 percent of the national income.

certainly not the elite institution that railroad tycoon Leland Stanford envisioned building when

The captains of industry did not exactly distinguish themselves as publicly spirited. A few, like Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, established noted charities, but most echoed the sentiments of William H. Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, who, when asked by a reporter for the New York Times about keeping open the New York to New Haven line on the assumption that it was run for the public benefit, responded famously, “The public be damned.” Vanderbilt proceeded to give the reporter a short lecture on capitalism. “I don’t take stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody’s good but our own because we are not. Railroads are not run on sentiment, but on business principles, and to pay.

One spring evening in 1896, a prominent Pennsylvanian named Hamilton Disston blew his brains out in a bathtub. He had become gravely depressed after depleting his inheritance on a grandiose campaign to drain 4 million acres of Florida swamp known as the Everglades. Although Disston died believing himself a failure, he was later proven a pioneer and an inspiration. In the years that followed, one version or another of his rapacious fantasy was pursued by legions of avaricious speculators—land developers, bankers, railroad barons, real-estate promoters, citrus growers, cattle ranchers, sugar tycoons and, last but not least, the politicians they owned.

She let him into the house secretly, saw him privately, and kept him out of his father’s sight.53 And yet, even Corneil, this creature of deceit, could not deny the truth about himself. He alternated his bombast with references to “my shame & mortification & sorrow.” He was literally fatalistic about his hope of reform. He wrote to Greeley of his “determination to humbly forfeit my life as the penalty of further vice.” It was the one prediction about himself that would come true.54 ON FEBRUARY 15, 1866, the locomotive Augustus Schell chuffed onto the Albany bridge and rolled westward along its 2,020-foot span, over a total of nineteen piers, across an iron turntable above the center of the river below, and rattled down into Albany itself. Following this symbolic inauguration, the first passenger train crossed one week later. After four years of construction (and many more of litigation), the bridge gave the New York Central a continuous, direct connection to the Hudson River Railroad, and thus to Manhattan. But its completed track became a lighted fuse.55 The Commodore’s cold response to Corneil’s backsliding revealed the icy judge who had always lurked behind the encouraging father. So, too, did the implacable warrior remain within the diplomat who had negotiated with Corning and Richmond. In December 1865, for example, the New York Court of Appeals handed down final judgment in the long-running court battle between Vanderbilt and the New York & New Haven Railroad over the shares that Schuyler had fraudulently issued in 1854. Over the years, weary shareholders had settled with the company—but the Commodore refused. He had waged his battle until the court ruled that the company owed $900,000 to Schuyler’s victims. “The great principle is now settled by the highest court in this State,” wrote the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, “that railroad and other corporations are bound by the fraudulent acts of their own agents.”56 It was, indeed, a great principle—but businessmen also saw a more personal lesson in the Schuyler fraud case. “The Commodore’s word is as good as his bond when it is fairly