CHAPTER IX
THE RISE OF THE GOULD FORTUNE
The greater part of this commanding fortune was originally heaped up, as was that of Commodore Vanderbilt, in about fifteen years, and at approximately the same time. One of the most powerful fortunes in the United States, it now controls, or has exercised a dominant share of the control, over more than 18,000 miles of railway, the total ownership of which is represented by considerably more than a billion dollars in stocks and bonds. The Gould fortune is also either openly or covertly paramount in many telegraph, transatlantic cable, mining, land and industrial corporations.
Its precise proportions no one knows except the Gould family itself. That it reaches many hundreds of millions of dollars is fairly obvious, although what is its exact figure is a matter not to be easily ascertained. In the flux of present economic conditions, which, so far as the control of the resources of the United States is concerned, have simmered down to desperate combats between individual magnates, or contesting sets of magnates, the proportions of great fortunes, especially those based upon railroads and industries, constantly tend to vary.
In the years 1908 and 1909 the Gould fortune, if report be true, was somewhat diminished by the onslaughts of that catapultic railroad baron, E. H. Harriman, who unceremoniously seized a share of the voting control of some of the railroad systems long controlled by the Goulds. Despite this reported loss, the Gould fortune is an active, aggressive and immense one, vested with the most extensive power, and embracing hundreds of millions of dollars in cash, land, palaces, or profit-producing property in the form of bonds and stocks. Its influence and ramifications, like those of the Vanderbilt and of other huge fortunes, penetrate directly or indirectly into every inhabited part of the United States, and into Mexico and other foreign countries.