DRIVING OUT COMPETITORS.
Judging from the records of the times, one of his most effective means for harassing and driving out competitors was in bribing the New York Common Council to give him, and refuse them, dock privileges. As the city owned the docks, the Common Council had the exclusive right of determining to whom they should be leased. Not a year passed but what the ship, ferry and steamboat owners, the great landlords and other capitalists bribed the aldermen to lease or give them valuable city property. Many scandals resulted, culminating in the great scandal of 1853, when the Grand Jury, on February 26, handed up a presentment showing in detail how certain aldermen had received bribes for disposal of the city's water rights, pier privileges and other property, and how enormous sums had been expended in bribes to get railroad grants in the city. [Footnote: Proceedings of the New York Board of Aldermen, xlviii: 423-431.] Vanderbilt was not openly implicated in these frauds, no more than were the Astors, the Rhinelanders, the Goelets and other very rich men who prudently kept in the background, and who managed to loot the city by operating through go-betweens.
Vanderbilt's eulogists take great pains to elaborate upon his tremendous energy, sagacity and constructive enterprise, as though these were the exclusive qualities by which he got his fortune. Such a glittering picture, common in all of the usual biographies of rich men, discredits itself and is overthrown by the actual facts. The times in which Vanderbilt lived and thrived were not calculated to inspire the masses of people with respect for the trader's methods, although none could deny that the outcropping capitalists of the period showed a fierce vigor in overcoming obstacles of man and of nature, and in extending their conquests toward the outposts of the habitable globe.
If indomitable enterprise assured permanency of wealth then many of Vanderbilt's competitors would have become and remained multimillionaires. Vanderbilt, by no means possessed a monopoly of acquisitive enterprise; on every hand, and in every line, were men fully as active and unprincipled as he. Nearly all of these men, and scores of competitors in his own sphere—dominant capitalists in their day—have become well-nigh lost in the records of time; their descendants are in the slough of poverty, genteel or otherwise. Those times were marked by the intensest commercial competition; business was a labyrinth of sharp tricks and low cunning; the man who managed to project his head far above the rest not only had to practice the methods of his competitors but to overreach and outdo them. It was in this regard that Vanderbilt showed superior ability.
In the exploitation of the workers—forcing them to work for low wages and compelling them to pay high prices for all necessities— Vanderbilt was no different from all contemporaneous capitalists. Capitalism subsisted by this process. Almost all conventional writers, it is true, set forth that it was the accepted process of the day, implying that it was a condition acquiesced in by the employer and worker. This is one of the lies disseminated for the purpose of proving that the great fortunes were made by legitimate methods. Far from being accepted by the workers it was denounced and was openly fought by them at every auspicious opportunity.
Vanderbilt became one of the largest ship and steamboat builders in the United States and one of the most formidable employers of labor. At one time he had a hundred vessels afloat. Thousands of shipwrights, mechanics and other workers toiled for him fourteen and sixteen hours a day at $1.50 a day for many years. The actual purchasing power of this wage kept declining as the cost of rent and other necessaries of life advanced. This was notably so after the great gold discoveries in California, when prices of all commodities rose abnormally, and the workers in every trade were forced to strike for higher wages in order to live. Most of these strikes were successful, but their results as far as wages went were barren; the advance wrung from employers was by no means equal to the increased cost of living.