Great Fortunes from Railroads

by Gustavus Myers

GOVERNMENT BY PROPERTY INTERESTS.

Hence it is that most histories are mere registers of names and dates, dull or highly-colored hackneyed splurges of print giving no insight into actual conditions.

In this respect most of the prevailing histories of the United States are the most egregious offenders. They fix the idea that this or that alleged statesman, this or that President or politician or set of politicians, have been the dominating factors in the decision and sway of public affairs. No greater error could be formulated. Behind the ostentatious and imposing public personages of the different periods, the arbiters of laws and policies have been the men of property. They it was who really ruled both the arena and the arcana of politics.

It was they, sometimes openly, but more usually covertly, who influenced and manipulated the entire sphere of government.

It was they who raised the issues which divided the people into contesting camps and which often beclouded and bemuddled the popular mind. It was their material ideals and interests that were engrafted upon the fabric of society and made the prevailing standards of the day.

From the start the United States Government was what may be called a regime swayed by property.

The Revolution, as we have seen, was a movement by the native property interests to work out their own destiny without interference by the trading classes of Great Britain. The Constitution of the United States, the various State Constitutions, and the laws, were, we have set forth, all reflexes of the interests, aims, castes and prejudices of the property owners, as opposed to the non-propertied. At first, the landholders and the shipping merchants were the dictators of laws. Then from these two classes and from the tradesmen sprang a third class, the bankers, who, after a continuous orgy of bribery, rose to a high pitch of power. At the same time, other classes of property owners were sharers in varying degrees in directing Government. One of these was the slaveholders of the South, desperately increasing their clutch on government administration the more their institutions were threatened. The factory owners were likewise participants. However bitterly some of these propertied interests might war upon one another for supremacy, there was never a time when the majority of the men who sat in Congress, the legislatures or the judges did not represent, or respond to, either the interests or the ideals of one or more of these divisions of the propertied classes.

Finally, out of the landowners, slaveowners, bankers, shippers, factory masters and tradesmen a new class of great power developed. This was the railroad-owning class. From about the year 1845 to 1890 it was the most puissant governing class in the United States, and only ceased being distinctly so when the industrial trusts became even mightier, and a time came when one trust alone, the Standard Oil Company, was able to possess itself of vast railroad systems.

These different components of the railroad-owning class had gathered in their money by either outright fraud or by the customary exploitative processes of the times. We have noted how many of the landholders secured their estates at one time or another by bribery or by invidiously fraudulent transactions; and how the bankers, who originally were either tradesmen, factory owners or landowners, had obtained their charters and privileges by widespread bribery. A portion of the money thus acquired was often used in bribing Congress and legislatures for railroad charters, public funds, immense areas of land including forests and mines, and special laws of the most extraordinary character.