One hundred thousand men signify, let us say, as many families. Accepting the average of five to a family, here are five hundred thousand souls whose livelihood is dependent upon largely the will of the Vanderbilt family. To that will there is no check. To-day it may be expansively benevolent; to-morrow, after a fit of indigestion or a night of demoralizing revelry, it may flit to an extreme of parsimonious retaliation. As the will fluctuates, so must be the fate of the hundred thousand workers. If the will decides that the pay of the men must go down, curtailed it is, irrespective of their protests that the lopping off of their already slender wages means still keener hardship. Apparently free and independent citizens, this army of workers belong for all essential purposes to the Vanderbilt family. Their jobs are the hostages held by the Vanderbilts. The interests and decisions of one family are supreme.
The germination and establishment of this immense power began with the activities of the first Cornelius Vanderbilt, the founder of this pile of wealth. He was born in 1794. His parents lived on Staten Island; his father conveyed passengers in a boat to and from New York—an industrious, dull man who did his plodding part and allowed his wife to manage household expenses. Regularly and obediently he turned his earnings over to her. She carefully hoarded every available cent, using an old clock as a depository.
THE FOUNDER'S START.
Vanderbilt was a rugged, headstrong, untamable, illiterate youth. At twelve years of age he could scarcely write his own name. But he knew the ways of the water; when still a youth he commenced ferrying passengers and freight between Staten Island and New York City. For books he cared nothing; the refinements of life he scorned. His one passion was money. He was grasping and enterprising, coarse and domineering. Of the real details of his early life little is known except what has been written by laudatory writers. We are informed that as he gradually made and saved money he built his own schooners, and went in for the coasting trade. The invention and success of the steamboat, it is further related, convinced him that the day of the sailing vessel would soon be over. He, therefore, sold his interest in his schooners, and was engaged as captain of a steamboat plying between New York and points on the New Jersey coast. His wife at the same time enlarged the family revenues by running a wayside tavern at New Brunswick, N. J., whither Vanderbilt had moved.
In 1829, when his resources reached $30,000, he quit as an employee and began building his own steamboats. Little by little he drove many of his competitors out of business. This he was able to do by his harsh, unscrupulous and strategic measures. [Footnote: Some glimpses of Vanderbilt's activities and methods in his early career are obtainable from the court records. In 1827 he was fined two penalties of $50 for refusing to move a steamboat called "The Thistle," commanded by him, from a wharf on the North River in order to give berth to "The Legislature," a competing steamboat. His defence was that Adams, the harbor master, had no authority to compel him to move. The lower courts decided against him, and the Supreme Court, on appeal, affirmed their judgment. (Adams vs. Vanderbilt. Cowen's Reports. Cases in Supreme Court of the State of New York, vii: 349- 353.)
In 1841 the Eagle Iron Works sued Vanderbilt for the sum of $2,957.15 which it claimed was due under a contract made by Vanderbilt on March 8, 1838. This contract called for the payment by Vanderbilt of $10,500 in three installments for the building of an engine for the steamboat "Wave." Vanderbilt paid $7,900, but refused to pay the remainder, on the ground that braces to the connecting rods were not supplied. These braces, it was brought out in court, cost only $75 or $100. The Supreme Court handed down a judgment against Vanderbilt. An appeal was taken by Vanderbilt, and Judge Nelson, in the Supreme Court, in October, 1841, affirmed that judgment.—Vanderbilt vs. Eagle Iron Works, Wendell's Reports, Cases in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, xxv: 665-668.] He was severe with the men who worked for him, compelling them to work long hours for little pay. He showed a singular ability in undermining competitors. They could not pay low wages but what he could pay lower; as rapidly as they set about reducing passenger and freight rates he would anticipate them. His policy at this time was to bankrupt competitors, and then having obtained a monopoly, to charge exorbitant rates. The public, which welcomed him as a benefactor in declaring cheaper rates and which flocked to patronize his line, had to pay dearly for their premature and short-sighted joy. For the first five years his profits, according to Croffut, reached $30,000 a year, doubling in successive years. By the time he was forty years old he ran steamboats to many cities on the coast, and had amassed a fortune of half a million dollars.
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.