The careers of Field, Leiter and several other Chicago multimillionaires ran in somewhat parallel grooves. Field was the son of a farmer. He was born in Conway, Mass., in 1835. When twenty-one he went to Chicago and worked in a wholesale dry goods house. In 1860 he was made a partner. During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world, proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its contracts at a time of distress. The Government and the public were forced to pay the highest sums for the poorest material. It was established that Government officials were in collusion with the contractors. This extortion formed one of the saddest and most sordid chapters of the Civil War (as it does of all wars,) but conventional history is silent on the subject, and one is compelled to look elsewhere for the facts of how the commercial houses imposed at high prices shoddy material and semi-putrid food upon the very army and navy that fought for their interests.[170] In the words of one of Field's laudatory biographers, "the firm coined money"—a phrase which for the volumes of significant meaning embodied in it, is an epitome of the whole profit system.
Some of the personnel of the firm changed several times: in 1865 Field, Leiter and Potter Palmer (who had also become a multimillionaire) associated under the firm name of Field, Leiter & Palmer. The great fire of 1871 destroyed the firm's buildings, but they were replaced. Subsequently the firm became Field, Leiter & Co., and, finally in 1887, Marshall Field & Co.[171] The firm conducted both a wholesale and retail business on what is called in commercial slang "a cash basis:" that is, it sold goods on immediate payment and not on credit. The volume of its business rose to enormous proportions. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a year.
CHAPTER IX
THE FIELD FORTUNE IN EXTENSO
In close similarity to the start of the Astors and many other founders of great land fortunes, commerce was the original means by which Marshall Field obtained the money which he invested in land. Consecutively came a ramification of other revenue-producing properties. Once in motion, the process worked in the same admixed, interconnected way as it did in the amassing of contemporary large fortunes. It may be literally compared to hundreds of golden streams flowing from as many sources to one central point. From land, business, railroads, street railways, public utility and industrial corporations—from these and many other channels, prodigious profits kept, and still keep, pouring in ceaselessly. In turn, these formed ever newer and widening distributing radii of investments. The process, by its own resistless volition, became one of continuous compound progression.
LAND FOR ALMOST NOTHING.
Long before the business of the firm of Marshall Field & Co. had reached the annual total of $50,000,000, Field, Leiter and their associates had begun buying land in Chicago. Little capital was needed for the purpose: The material growth of Chicago explains sufficiently how a few dollars put in land fifty or sixty years ago became in time an automatically-increasing fund of millions. A century or so ago the log cabin of John Kinzie was the only habitation on a site now occupied by a swarming, conglomerate, rushing population of 1,700,000.[172] Where the prairie land once stretched in solitude, a huge, roaring, choking city now stands, black with factories, the habitat of nearly two millions of human beings, living in a whirlpool of excitement and tumult, presenting extremes of wealth and poverty, the many existing in dire straits, the few rolling in sovereign luxury. A saying prevails in Chicago that the city now holds more millionaires than it did voters in 1840.
Land, in the infancy of the city, was cheap; few settlers there were, and the future could not be foreseen. In 1830 one-quarter of an acre could be bought for $20; a few bits of silver, or any currency whatsoever, would secure to the buyer a deed carrying with it a title forever, with a perpetual right of exclusive ownership and a perpetual hold upon all succeeding generations. The more population grew, the greater the value their labor gave the land; and the keener their need, the more difficult it became for them to get land.
Within ten years—by about the beginning of the year 1840—the price of a quarter of an acre in the center of the city had risen to $1,500. A decade later the established value was $17,500, and in 1860, $28,000. Chicago was growing with great rapidity; a network of railroads converged there; mammoth factories, mills, grain elevators, packing houses:—a vast variety of manufacturing and mercantile concerns set up in business, and brought thither swarms of workingmen and their families, led on by the need of food and the prospects of work. The greater the influx of workers, the more augmented became the value of land. Inevitably the greatest congestion of living resulted.