Field was one of the biggest dry goods manufacturers in the world. He owned, says a writer, scores of enormous factories in England, Ireland and Scotland. "The provinces of France," this eulogist goes on, "are dotted with his mills. The clatter of the Marshall Field looms is heard in Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria and Russia. Nor is the Orient neglected by this master of fabrics. Plodding Chinese and the skilled Japs are numbered by the thousands on the payroll of the Chicago merchant and manufacturer. On the other side of the equator are vast woolen mills in Australia, and the chain extends to South America, with factories in Brazil and in other of our neighboring republics."
In all of these factories the labor of men, women and children was harshly exploited; in nearly all of them the workers were in an unorganized state, and therefore deprived of every vestige of self-protection. Boys and girls of tenderest age were mercilessly ground into dollars; their young life's blood dyed deep the fabrics which brought Field riches. In this dehumanizing business Field was only doing what the entire commercial aristocracy the world over was doing.
How extraordinarily profitable the business of Marshall Field & Co. was (and is), may be seen in the fact that its shares (it became an incorporated stock company) were worth $1,000 each. At his death Marshall Field owned 3,400 of these shares, which the executors of his estate valued at $3,400,000. That the exploitation of labor, the sale of sweatshop and adulterated goods, and many other forms of oppression or fraud were a consecutive and integral part of his business methods is undeniable. But other factors, distinctly under the ban of the law, afford an additional explanation of how he was able to undersell petty competitors, situated even at a distance. What all of these factors were is not a matter of public knowledge. At least one of them came to light when, on December 4, 1907, D. R. Anthony, a representative in Congress from Kansas, supplied evidence to Postmaster-General Meyer that the house of Marshall Field & Co. had enjoyed, and still had, the privilege of secret discriminatory express rates in the shipment of goods. This charge, if sustained, was a clear violation of the law; but these violations by the great propertied interests were common, and entailed, at the worst, no other penalty than a nominal fine.
From such sources came the money with which he became a large landowner. Also, from the sources enumerated, came the money with which he and his associates debauched politics, and bribed common councils and legislatures to present them with public franchises for street and elevated railways, gas, telephone and electric light projects—franchises intrinsically worth incalculable sums.[177] With the money squeezed out of his legions of poverty-stricken employees and out of his rent-racked tenants he became an industrial monarch. The inventory of his estates filed in court by his executors revealed that he owned stocks and bonds in about one hundred and fifty corporations. This itemized list showed that he owned many millions of bonds and stocks in railroads with the construction and operation of which he had nothing to do. The history of practically all of them reeks with thefts of public and private money; corruption of common councils, of legislatures, Congress and of administrative officials; land grabbing, fraud, illegal transactions, violence, and oppression not only of their immediate workers, but of the entire population.[178] He owned—to give a few instances—$1,500,000 of Baltimore and Ohio stock; $600,000 of Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe; $1,860,000 of Chicago and Northwestern, and tens of millions more of the stock or bonds of about fifteen other railroads.
He also owned an immense assortment of the stocks of a large number of trusts. The affairs of these trusts have been shown in court, at some time or other, as overflowing with fraud, the most glaring oppressions, and violations of law. He had $450,000 in stock of the Corn Products Company (the Glucose Trust); $370,000 of the stock of the notorious Harvester Trust, which charges the farmer $75 for a machine that perhaps costs $16 in all to make and market, and which holds a great part of the farming population bound hand and foot; $350,000 of Biscuit Trust stock; $200,000 of American Tin Can Company (Tin Can Trust) stock; and large amounts of stock in other trusts. All of these stocks and bonds Field owned outright; he made it a rule never to buy a share of stock on margin or for speculative purposes. All told, he owned more than $55,000,000 in stocks and bonds.
A very considerable part of these were securities of Chicago surface and elevated railway, gas, electric light and telephone companies. In the corruption attending the securing of the franchises of these corporations he was a direct principal. The narrative of this part of his fortune, however, more pertinently belongs to subsequent chapters of this work.
CHAPTER X
FURTHER VISTAS OF THE FIELD FORTUNE
But if only to give at the outset a translucent example of Field's method's in the management of industrial corporations, it is well to advert here to the operations of one of his many properties—the Pullman Company, otherwise called the "Palace Car Trust." This is a necessary part of the exposition in order to bring out more of the methods by which Field was enabled to fling together his vast fortune.