Great Fortunes from Railroads

by Gustavus Myers

VANDERBILT'S CHIEF OF STAFF

His chief instrument during all those years was a general utility lawyer, Chauncey M. Depew, whose specialty was to hoodwink the public by grandiloquent exhibitions of mellifluent spread-eagle oratory, while bringing the "proper arguments" to bear upon legislators and other public officials. [Footnote: Roscoe Conkling, a noted Republican politician, said of him: "Chauncey Depew? Oh, you mean the man that Vanderbilt sends to Albany every winter to say 'haw' and 'gee' to his cattle up there.">[ Every one who could in any way be used, or whose influence required subsidizing, was, in the phrase of the day, "taken care of." Great sums of money were distributed outright in bribes in the legislatures by lobbyists in Vanderbilt's pay. Supplementing this, an even more insidious system of bribery was carried on. Free passes for railroad travel were lavishly distributed; no politician was ever refused; newspaper and magazine editors, writers and reporters were always supplied with free transportation for the asking, thus insuring to a great measure their good will, and putting them under obligations not to criticise or expose plundering schemes or individuals. All railroad companies used this form, as well as other forms, of bribery.

It was mainly by means of the free pass system that Depew, acting for the Vanderbilts, secured not only a general immunity from newspaper criticism, but continued to have himself and them portrayed in luridly favorable lights. Depending upon the newspapers for its sources of information, the public was constantly deceived and blinded, either by the suppression of certain news, or by its being tampered with and grossly colored. This Depew continued as the wriggling tool of the Vanderbilt family for nearly half a century. Astonishing as it may seem, he managed to pass among the uninformed as a notable man; he was continuously eulogized; at one time he was boomed for the nomination for President of the United States, and in 1905 when the Vanderbilt family decided to have a direct representative in the United States Senate, they ordered the New York State Legislature, which they practically owned, to elect him to that body. It was while he was a United States Senator that the investigations, in 1905, of a committee of the New York Legislature into the affairs of certain life insurance companies revealed that Depew had long since been an advisory party to the gigantic swindles and briberies carried on by Hyde, the founder and head of the Equitable Life Assurance Society.

The career of Depew is of no interest to posterity, excepting in so far as it shows anew how the magnates were able to use intermediaries to do their underground work for them, and to put those intermediaries into the highest official positions in the country. This fact alone was responsible for their elevation to such bodies as the United States Senate, the President's Cabinet and the courts. Their long service as lobbyists or as retainers was the surest passport to high political or judicial position; their express duty was to vote or decide as their masters' interest bid them. So it was (as it is now) that men who had bribed right and left, and who had put their cunning or brains at the complete disposal of the magnates, filled Congress and the courts. These were, to a large extent, the officials by whose votes or decisions all measures of value to the working class were defeated; and reversely, by whose actions all or nearly all bills demanded by the money interests, were passed and sustained.

Here we are again forced to notice the truism thrusting itself forward so often and conspicuously; that law was essentially made by the great criminals of society, and that, thus far it has been a frightful instrument, based upon force, for legalizing theft on a large scale. By law the great criminals absolve themselves and at the same time declare drastic punishment for the petty criminals. The property obtained by theft is converted into a sacred vested institution; the men who commit the theft or their hirelings sit in high places, and pass laws surrounding the proceeds of that theft with impregnable fortifications of statutes; should any poor devil, goaded on by the exasperations of poverty, venture to help himself to even the tiniest part of that property, the severest penalty, enacted by those same plunderers, is mercilessly visited upon him.

After having bribed legislatures to legalize his enormous issue of watered stock, what was Vanderbilt's next move? The usual fraudulent one of securing exemption from taxation. He and other railroad owners sneaked through law after law by which many of their issues of stock were made non-taxable.

So now old shaggy Vanderbilt loomed up the richest magnate in the United States. His ambition was consummated; what mattered it to him that his fortune was begot in blackmail and extortion, bribery and theft? Now that he had his hundred millions he had the means to demand adulation and the semblance of respect, if not respect itself. The commercial world admired, even while it opposed, him; in his methods it saw at bottom the abler application and extension of its own, and while it felt aggrieved at its own declining importance and power, it rendered homage in the awed, reverential manner in which it viewed his huge fortune.

Over and over again, even to the point of wearisome repetition, must it be shown, both for the sake of true historical understanding and in justice to the founders of the great fortunes, that all mercantile society was permeated with fraud and subsisted by fraud. But the prevalence of this fraud did not argue its practitioners to be inherently evil. They were victims of a system inexorably certain to arouse despicable qualities. The memorable difference between the two classes was that the workers, as the sufferers, were keenly alive to the abominations of the system, while the capitalists not only insisted upon the right to benefit from its continuance, but harshly sought to repress every attempt of the workers to agitate for its modification or overthrow.