A FORTUNE OF $700,000,000
From $105,000,000 bequeathed at his death, the Vanderbilt fortune has grown until it now reaches fully $700,000,000. This is an approximate estimate; the actual amount may be more or less. In 1889 Shearman placed the wealth of Cornelius and William K. Vanderbilt, grandsons of the first Cornelius, at $100,000,000 each, and that of Frederick W. Vanderbilt, a brother of those two men, at $20,000,000. [Footnote: "Who Owns the United States?"—The Forum Magazine, November, 1889.] Adding the fortunes of the various other members of the Vanderbilt family, the Vanderbilts then possessed about $300,000,000. Since that time the population and resources of the United States have vastly increased; wealth in the hold of a few has become more intensely centralized; great fortunes have gone far beyond their already extraordinary boundaries of twenty years ago; the possessions of the Vanderbilts have expanded and swollen in value everywhere, although recently the Standard Oil oligarchy has been encroaching upon their possessions. Very probable it is that the combined Vanderbilt fortune reaches fully $700,000,000, actually and potentially.
But the incidental mention of such a mass of money conveys no adequate conception of the power of this family. Nominally it is composed of private citizens with theoretically the same rights and limitations of citizenship held by any other citizen and no more. But this is a fanciful picture. In reality, the Vanderbilt family is one of the dynasties of inordinately rich families ruling the United States industrially and politically. Singly it has mastery over many of the railroad and public utility systems and industrial corporations of the United States. In combination with other powerful men or families of wealth, it shares the dictatorship of many more corporations. Under the Vanderbilts' direct domination are 21,000 miles of railroad lines, the ownership of which is embodied in $600,000,000 in stocks and $700,000,000 in bonds. One member alone, William K. Vanderbilt, is a director of seventy-three transportation and industrial combinations or corporations.
BONDS THAT HOLD PRESENT AND POSTERITY.
Behold, in imagination at least, this mass of stocks and bonds. Heaps of paper they seem; dead, inorganic things. A second's blaze will consume any one of them, a few strokes of the fingers tear it into shapeless ribbons Yet under the institution of law, as it exists, these pieces of paper are endowed with a terrible power of life and death that even enthroned kings do not possess. Those dainty prints with their scrolls and numerals and inscriptions are binding titles to the absolute ownership of a large part of the resources created by the labors of entire peoples.
Kingly power at best is shadowy, indefinite, depending mostly upon traditional custom and audacious assumption backed by armed force. If it fall back upon a certain alleged divine right it cannot produce documents to prove its authority. The industrial monarchs of the United States are fortified with both power and proofs of possession. Those bonds and stocks are the tangible titles to tangible property; whoso holds them is vested with the ownership of the necessities of tens of millions of subjected people. Great stretches of railroad traverse the country; here are coal mines to whose products some ninety million people look for warmth; yonder are factories; there in the cities are street car lines and electric light and power supply and gas plants; on every hand are lands and forests and waterways— all owned, you find, by this or that dominant man or family.
The mind wanders back in amazement to the times when, if a king conquered territory, he had to erect a fortress or castle and station a garrison to hold it. They that then disputed the king's title could challenge, if they chose, at peril of death, the provisions of that title, which same provisions were swords and spears, arrows and muskets.
But nowhere throughout the large extent of the Vanderbilt's possessions or those of other ruling families are found warlike garrisons as evidence of ownership. Those uncouth barbarian methods are grossly antiquated; the part once played by armed battalions is now performed by bits of paper. A wondrously convenient change has it been; the owners of the resources of nations can disport themselves thousands of miles away from the scene of their ownership; they need never bestir themselves to provide measures for the retention of their property. Government, with its array of officials, prisons, armies and navies, undertakes all of this protection for them. So long as they hold these bits of paper in their name, Government recognizes them as the incontestable owners and safeguards their property accordingly. The very Government established on the taxation of the workers is used to enforce the means by which the workers are held in subjection.
THEY DECREE TAXES AT WILL.
These batches of stocks and bonds betoken as much more again. A pretty fiction subsists that Government, the creator of the modern private corporation, is necessarily more powerful than its creature. This theoretical doctrine, so widely taught by university professors and at the same time so greatly at variance with the palpable facts, will survive to bring dismay in the near future to the very classes who would have the people believe it so. Instead of now being the superior of the corporation the Government has long since definitely surrendered to private corporations a tremendous taxing power amounting virtually to a decree authorizing enslavement. Upon every form of private corporation—railroad, industrial, mining, public utility—is conferred a peculiarly sweeping and insidious power of taxation the indirectness of which often obscures its frightful nature and effects.