Great Fortunes from Railroads

by Gustavus Myers

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.

REPRESSION BY STARVATION.

These repressive tactics took on a variety of forms, some of which are not ordinarily included in the definitions of repression.

The usual method was that of subsidizing press and pulpit in certain subtle ways. By these means facts were concealed or distorted, a prejudicial state of public opinion created, and plausible grounds given for hostile interference by the State. But a far more powerful engine of repression was the coercion exercised by employers in forcing their workers to remain submissive on instant peril of losing their jobs. While, at that time, manufacturers, jobbers and shopkeepers throughout the country were rising in angry protest against the accumulation of plundering power in the hands of such men as Vanderbilt, Gould and Huntington, they were themselves exploiting and bribing on a widespread scale. Their great pose was that of a thorough commercial respectability; it was in this garb that they piously went to legislatures and demanded investigations into the rascally methods of the railroad magnates. The facts, said they, should be made public, so as to base on them appropriate legislation which would curtail the power of such autocrats. Contrasted with the baseness and hypocrisy of the trading class, Vanderbilt's qualities of brutal candor and selfishness shine out as brilliant virtues. [Footnote: No observation could be truer. As a class, the manufacturers were flourishing on stolen inventions. There might be exceptions, but they were very rare. Year after year, decade after decade, the reports of the various Commissioners of Patents pointed out the indiscriminate theft of inventions by the capitalists. In previous chapters we have referred to the plundering of Whitney and Goodyear. But they were only two of a vast number of inventors similarly defrauded.

In speaking of the helplessness of inventors, J. Holt, Commissioner of Patents, wrote in his Annual Report for 1857: "The insolence and unscrupulousness of capital, subsidizing and leading on its minions in the work of pirating some valuable invention held by powerless hands, can scarcely by conceived by those not familiar with the records of such cases as I have referred to. Inventors, however gifted in other respects, are known to be confiding and thriftless; and being generally without wealth, and always without knowledge of the chicaneries of law, they too often prove but children in those rude conflicts which they are called on to endure with the stalwart fraud and cunning of the world." (U. S. Senate Documents, First Session, Thirty-fifth Congress, 1857-58, viii: 9-10). In his Annual Report for 1858, Commissioner Holt described how inventors were at the mercy of professional perjurers whom the capitalists hired to give evidence.

The bribing of Patent office officials was a common occurrence. "The attention of Congress," reported Commissioner of Patents Charles Mason in 1854, "is invited to the importance of providing some adequate means of preventing attempts to obtain patents by improper means." Several cases of "attempted bribery" had occurred within the year, stated Commissioner Mason. (Executive Documents, First Session, Thirty-third Congress, 1853-54, Vol. vii, Part I: 19-20.) Every successive Commissioner of Patents called upon Congress to pass laws for the prevention of fraud, and for the better protection of the inventor, but Congress, influenced by the manufacturers, was deaf to these appeals.]