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.