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.
REGARDED AS A COMMERCIAL BUCCANEER.
The exploitation of labor, however, does not account for his success as a money maker. Many other men did the same, and yet in the vicissitudes of business went bankrupt; the realm of business was full of wrecks. Vanderbilt's success arose from his destructive tactics toward his competitors. He was regarded universally as the buccaneer of the shipping world. He leisurely allowed other men to build up profitable lines of steamboats, and he then proceeded to carry out methods which inevitably had one of two terminations: either his competitor had to buy him off at an exorbitant price, or he was left in undisputed possession. His principal biographer, Croffut, whose effusion is one long chant of praise, treats these methods as evidences of great shrewdness, and goes on: "His foible was 'opposition;' wherever his keen eye detected a line that was making a very large profit on its investment, he swooped down on it and drove it to the wall by offering a better service and lower rates." [Footnote: "The Vanderbilts and the Story of Their Fortune," by W. A. Croffut, 1886: 45-46.] This statement is only partially true; its omissions are more significant than its admissions.
Far from being the "constructive genius" that he is represented in every extant biographical work and note, Vanderbilt was the foremost mercantile pirate and commercial blackmailer of his day.
Harsh as these terms may seem, they are more than justified by the facts. His eulogists, in line with those of other rich men, weave a beautiful picture for the edification of posterity, of a broad, noble-minded man whose honesty was his sterling virtue, and whose splendid ability in opening up and extending the country's resources was rewarded with a great fortune and the thanks of his generation. This is utterly false. He who has the slightest knowledge of the low practices and degraded morals of the trading class and of the qualities which insured success, might at once suspect the spuriousness of this extravagant presentation, even if the vital facts were unavailable.
But there is no such difficulty. Obviously, for every one fraudulent commercial or political transaction that comes to public notice, hundreds and thousands of such transactions are kept in concealment. Enough facts, however, remain in official records to show the particular methods Vanderbilt used in getting together his millions. Yet no one hitherto seems to have taken the trouble to disinter them; even serious writers who cannot be accused of wealth worship or deliberate misstatement have all, without exception, borrowed their narratives of Vanderbilt's career from the fiction of his literary, newspaper and oratorical incense burners. And so it is that everywhere the conviction prevails that whatever fraudulent methods Vanderbilt employed in his later career, he was essentially an honest, straightforward man who was compelled by the promptings of sheer self-preservation to fight back at unscrupulous competitors or antagonists, and who innately was opposed to underhand work or fraud in any form. Vanderbilt is in every case portrayed as an eminently high-minded man who never stooped to dissimulation, deceit or treachery, and whose first millions, at any rate, were made in the legitimate ways of trade as they were then understood.
EXTORTION AND THEFT COMMON.
The truth is that the bulk of Vanderbilt's original millions were the proceeds of extortion, blackmail and theft.
In the established code of business the words extortion and theft had an unmistakable significance. Business men did not consider it at all dishonorable to oppress their workers; to manufacture and sell goods under false pretenses; to adulterate prepared foods and drugs; to demand the very highest prices for products upon which the very life of the people depended, and at a time when consumers needed them most; to bribe public officials and to hold up the Government in plundering schemes. These and many other practices were looked upon as commonplaces of ordinary trade.