Up to the very last second of his life his mind was filled with a whirl of business schemes; it was while discussing railroad plans with Robert Garrett in his mansion, on December 8, 1885, that he suddenly shot forward from his chair and fell apoplectically to the floor, and in a twinkling was dead. Servants ran to and fro excitedly; messengers were dispatched to summon his sons; telegrams flashed the intelligence far and wide.
The passing away of the greatest of men could not have received a tithe of the excitement and attention caused by William H. Vanderbilt's death. The newspaper offices hotly issued page after page of description, not without sufficient reason. For he, although untitled and vested with no official power, was in actuality an autocrat; dictatorship by money bags was an established fact; and while the man died, his corporate wealth, the real director and center, to a large extent, of government functions, survived unimpaired.
He had abundantly proved his autocracy. Law after law had he violated; like his father he had corrupted and intimidated, had bought laws, ignored such as were unsuited to his interests, and had decreed his own rules and codes. Progressively bolder had the money kings become in coming out into the open in the directing of Government. Long had they prudently skulked behind forms, devices and shams; they had operated secretly through tools in office, while virtuously disclaiming any insidious connection with politics. But no observer took this pretence seriously. James Bryce, fresh from England, delving into the complexities and incongruities of American politics at about this time, wrote that "these railway kings are among the greatest men, perhaps I may say, the greatest men in America," which term, "greatest," was a ludicrously reverent way of describing their qualities. "They have power," he goes on in the same work, "more power—that is, more opportunity to make their will prevail, than perhaps any one in political life except the President or the Speaker, who, after all, hold theirs only for four years and two years, while the railroad monarch holds his for life." [Footnote: "The American Commonwealth." First Ed.: 515.] Bryce was not well enough acquainted with the windings and depths of American political workings to know that the money kings had more power than President or Speaker, not nominally, but essentially. He further relates how when a railroad magnate traveled, his journey was like a royal progress; Governors of States and Territories bowed before him; Legislatures received him in solemn session; cities and towns sought to propitiate him, for had he not the means of making or marring a city's fortunes? "You cannot turn in any direction in American politics," wrote Richard T. Ely a little later, "without discovering the railway power. It is the power behind the throne. It is a correct popular instinct which designates the leading men in the railways, railroad magnates or kings. … Its power ramifies in every direction, its roots reaching counting rooms, editorial sanctums, schools and churches which it supports with a part of its revenues, as well as courts and Legislatures." … [Footnote: "The Independent," issue of August 28, 1890.]
HIS DEATH A NOTABLE EVENT.
Vanderbilt's death, as that of one of the real monarchs of the day, was an event of transcendent importance, and was treated so. The vocabulary was ransacked to find adjectives glowing enough to describe his enterprise, foresight, sagacity and integrity. Much elaborated upon was the fiction that he had increased his fortune by honest, legitimate means—a fiction still disseminated by those shallow or mercenary writers whose trade is to spread orthodox belief in existing conditions. The underlying facts of his career and methods were purposely suppressed, and a nauseating sort of panegyric substituted. Who did not know that he had bribed Legislature after Legislature, and had constantly resorted to conspiracy and fraud? Not one of his eulogists was innocent of this knowledge; the record of it was too public and palpable to justify doubts of its truth. The extent of his possessions and the size of his fortune aroused wonderment, but no effort was made to contrast the immense wealth bequeathed by one man with the dire poverty on every hand, nor to connect those two conditions.
At the very time his wealth was being inventoried at $200,000,000, not less than a million wage earners were out of employment, [Footnote: "It is probably true," said Carroll D. Wright in the United States Labor Report for 1886, "that this total (in round numbers 1,000,000) as representing the unemployed at any one time in the United States, is fairly representative.">[ while the millions at work received the scantiest wages. Nearly three millions of people had been completely pauperized, and, in one way or another, had to be supported at public expense. Once in a rare while, some perceptive and unshackled public official might pierce the sophistries of the day and reveal the cause of this widespread poverty, as Ira Steward did in the fourth annual report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor for 1873.
"It is the enormous profits," he pointedly wrote, "made directly upon the labor of the wage classes, and indirectly through the results of their labor, that, first, keeps them poor, and, second, furnishes the capital that is finally loaned back to them again" at high rates of interest. Unquestionably sound and true was this explanation, yet of what avail was it if the causes of their poverty were withheld from the active knowledge of the mass of the wage workers? It was the special business of the newspapers, the magazines, the pulpit and the politicians to ignore, suppress or twist every particle of information that might enlighten or arouse the mass of people; if these agencies were so obtuse or recalcitrant as not to know their expected place and duty at critical times, they were quickly reminded of them by the propertied classes. To any newspaper owner, clergyman or politician showing a tendency to radicalism, the punishment came quickly. The newspaper owner was deprived of advertisements and accommodations, the clergyman was insidiously hounded out of his pulpit by his own church associations, the funds of which came from men of wealth, and the politician was ridiculed and was summarily retired to private life by corrupt means. As for genuinely honest administrative officials (as distinguished from the apparently honest) who exposed prevalent conditions and sought to remedy them in their particular departments, they were eventually got rid of by a similar campaign of calumny and corrupt influences.
HIS FRAUDS IN EVADING TAXES.
As in the larger sense all criticism of conditions was systematically smothered, so were details of the methods of the rich carefully obscured or altogether passed by in silence. At Vanderbilt's death the newspapers laved in gorgeous descriptions of his mansion. Yet apart from the proceeds of his great frauds, the amounts out of which he had cheated the city and State in taxation were alone much more than enough to have paid for his splendor of living. Like the Astors, the Goelets, Marshall Field and every other millionaire without exception, he continuously defrauded in taxes.
We have seen how the Vanderbilts seized hold of tens of millions of dollars of bonds by fraud. Certain of their railroad stocks were exempted from individual taxation, but railroad bonds ranked as taxable personal property. Year after year William H. Vanderbilt had perjured himself in swearing that his personal property did not exceed $500,000. On more than this amount he would not pay. When at his death his will revealed to the public the proportions of his estate, the New York City Commissioners of Assessments and Taxes made an apparent effort to collect some of the millions of dollars out of which he had cheated the city. It was now that the obsequious and time-serving Depew, grown gray and wrinkled in the retainership of the Vanderbilt generations, came forward with this threat: "He informed us," testified Michael Coleman, president of the commission, "that if we attempted to press too hard he would take proceedings by which most of the securities would be placed beyond our reach so that we could not tax them. The Vanderbilt family could convert everything they had into non-taxable securities, such as New York Central, Government and city bonds, Delaware and Lackawanna, and Delaware and Western Railroad stocks, and pay not a dollar provided they wished to do so." [Footnote: The New York Senate Committee on Cities, 1890, iii: 2355-2356.]