"REFORM" AS IT WORKS OUT.
But these were not his only gifts from the "reform" Legislature. The Harlem Railroad owned, as we have seen, the Fourth avenue surface line of horse cars. Although until this time it extended to Seventy- ninth street only, this line was then the second most profitable in New York City. In 1864, for instance, it carried nearly six million passengers, and its gross earnings were $735,000. It did not pay, nor was required to pay, a single cent in taxation. By 1872 the city's population had grown to 950,000. Vanderbilt concluded that the time was fruitful to gather in a few more miles of the public streets.
The Legislature was acquiescent. Chapter 325 of the Laws of 1872 allowed him to extend the line from Seventy-ninth street to as far north as Madison avenue should thereafter be opened. "But see," said the Legislature in effect, "how mindful of the public interests we have been. We have imposed a tax of five per cent, on all gross receipts above Seventy-ninth street." When, however, the time came to collect, Vanderbilt innocently pretended that he had no means of knowing whether the fares were taken in on that section of the line, free of taxation, below Seventy-ninth street, or on the taxed portion above it. Behind that fraudulent subterfuge the city officials have never been inclined to go, nor have they made any effort. As a consequence the only revenue that the city has since received from that line has been a meager few thousand dollars a year.
At the very time that he was watering stock, sliding through legislatures corrupt grants of perpetual franchises, and swindling cities and States out of huge sums in taxes, [Footnote: Not alone he. In a tabulated report made public on February 1, 1872, the New York Council of Political Reform charged that in the single item of surface railways, New York City for a long period had been swindled annually out of at least a million dollars. This was an underestimate. All other sections of the capitalist class swindled likewise in taxes.] Vanderbilt was forcing the drivers and conductors on the Fourth avenue surface line to work an average of fifteen hours out of twenty-four, and reducing their daily wages from $2.25 to $2.
Vanderbilt made the pretense that it was necessary to economize; and, as was the invariable rule of the capitalists, the entire burden of the economizing process was thrown upon the already overloaded workers. This subtraction of twenty-five cents a day entailed upon the drivers and conductors and their families many severe deprivations; working for such low wages every cent obviously counted in the management of household affairs. But the methods of the capitalist class in deliberately pyramiding its profits upon the sufferings of the working class were evidenced in this case (as they had been, and since have been, in countless other instances) by the announcement in the Wall Street reports that this reduction in wages was followed by an instant rise in the price of the stock of the Fourth avenue surface line. The lower the wages, the greater the dividends.
The further history of the Fourth avenue surface line cannot here be pursued in detail. Suffice to say that the Vanderbilts, in 1894, leased this line for 999 years to the Metropolitan Street Railway Company, controlled by those eminent financiers, William C. Whitney and others, whose monumental briberies, thefts and piracies have frequently been uncovered in official investigations. For almost a thousand years, unless a radical change of conditions comes, the Vanderbilts will draw a princely revenue from the ownership of this franchise alone.
It is not necessary to enter into a narrative of all the laws that Vanderbilt bribed Legislature after Legislature, and Common Council after Common Council, into passing—laws giving him for nothing immensely valuable grants of land, shore rights and rights to land under water, more authorizations to make further consolidations and to issue more watered stock. Nor is it necessary to deal with the numerous bills he considered adverse to his interests, that he caused to be smothered in legislative committees by bribery.
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.