April 22, 2019 • 30 mins
Fair was a contemporary of Levi Strauss, living and working in San Francisco around the same time as the denim magnate, but though Fair often appears on lists of the richest men in U.S. history, he doesn’t have the same name recognition.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
So DRAYZ. Back in the fall, when I was visiting
San Francisco, Uh, as you recall, we ended our tour
(00:22):
there and then I stayed for a week because I
love that city. Um. But the hotel that we were
staying in had a photo of Senator James G. Fair
framed and sitting on a little um piece of furniture
in the parlor, and my interest was immediately sparked because
there was no context for this, which is they're just
sitting there. There's just there. Uh. And so I asked
around and it turned out that Fair had actually paid
(00:44):
for that building to be established as a boarding school
in eight ninety and that school was run by a
teacher named Mary Lake, and there were rumors at the
time that she and Fair were romantically involved. They both
denied these, but incidentally, Mary Lake allegedly haunts that hotel.
All she never visited me, to the best of my knowledge. Uh,
(01:04):
we didn't see her. But I then was kind of
left with the desire to know a lot more about
James G. Fair, and it turned out as I did
some digging. Oh, he was a piece of work. Uh.
He was a contemporary of Levi Strauss. He was living
and working in San Francisco around the same time as
the Denham Magnet. But though Fair often appears on lists
(01:25):
of the richest men in US history, he just doesn't
have the same level of name recognition, and so I
thought it might be fun to do an episode on him.
But spoiler alert, it's unlikely that you're going to come
away from this episode feeling warm and fuzzy about James G.
Fair the way you might have after the Levi Strouss episode.
He's not quite as magnanimous and lovely a man. Yeah,
(01:46):
if your primary uh affection is for money and the
making thereof, you might be super into it, maybe at
all costs, regardless of your search for money. Fair story
starts in Kloer County, Torone in Ireland, where he was
born on December three, thirty one, and his father's name
(02:09):
was also James Fair. His mother's maiden name was Graham
and that's where he got his middle name. Yeah, we
don't know her first name any longer. The records don't
seem to clearly indicate what her first name was. But
when James was twelve, his family immigrated to the United
States and they lived briefly in Geneva, Illinois. After finishing
his early schooling in Geneva, Fair went on to study
(02:31):
both business and science in Chicago, but the California gold
rush captured his attention and ambition when that whole thing
blew up, and so at the age of eighteen, Fair
left Illinois to seek his fortune in mining. At first,
he worked in place our mining, and that is using
water to excavate and recover the deposit that you're trying
(02:51):
to get. At the most basic form place our mining
is panning, but there are much larger scale and more
industrial forms of place our mining as well. He did
okay in these efforts. He made a little bit of money,
but it was never quite the major income that he
was hoping for, and Fair floundered around a little bit.
Once he decided that gold might not be the road
to wealth for him. He tried mining for courts, because
(03:13):
a lot of courts was part of the source for
where all of these gold mines were coming from. But
he only met with a little bit of success, and
then he actually gave farming a world for a little
while on a plot near Petaluma, California, but that was
similarly unfulfilling and not really very profitable, and he gave
up after six months. In the early eighteen sixties, he
(03:33):
shifted his gears again away from gold and courts and
agriculture and California. This time he set his sights on Nevada.
In the late eighteen fifties, silver loads had been discovered
in Nevada, and Fair was eager to be one of
the first people to capitalize on the silver trade. Yeah,
he didn't run out there right as these silver loads
were being discovered. He kind of wanted to get a
(03:54):
sense of the whole situation and if it was really
a viable thing, since gold had not worked out. But
once he realized like, oh, this is a very real opportunity,
he was on top of it. It was a really
smart move, as he was much more successful in silver
mining than he had been in gold mining, although I
should point out that many of these mines were also
producing both silver angld, but silver was just what was
(04:16):
making the most money. He went to Virginia City Nevada,
which is south of Reno. It's to the east of
Lake Tahoe's northern tip and Fair worked prospecting in Virginia
City for five years on his own, but in eighteen
sixty five a corporate enterprise hired him as it's superintendent,
and that mine was the oper Mine, named after King
Solomon's Oh Fear mine from which so much wealth had sprung.
(04:39):
Soon Fair was showing just how good he was managing
the over mines, business interests and day to day functions,
and that skill attracted the attentions of other mining operations.
He was hired as director of the Hale and Norcross mine.
He also became friends with John W. McKay. His work
at Hale and Norcross turned it from something that just
(04:59):
was turning a profit into a valuable venture. It resulted
in two billion dollars over the course of two years.
That money didn't go back to Fair, though it went
to the company. In eighteen sixties seven, Fair and Hale
and Norcross severed their relationship for reasons that have never
been totally clear. Yeah, there are a lot of theories
about maybe him being frustrated that he wasn't really getting
(05:23):
much of the profit and that he kind of just
told them to go take a hike, or that he
may have been making noises like that and they told
him to go take a hike. We don't really know
what happened exactly, but Fair and his friend McKay, who
had also been working in mining towns, joined forces with
San Francisco stockbrokers James C. Flood and W. S. O'Brien
(05:43):
to buy a controlling interest in the Hale and Norcross
mine in eighteen sixty eight, and that fore man partnership
eventually came to be known by the nickname the Silver Kings.
All of them were Irish. James Flood was not born
in Ireland, but he was born in New York shortly
after his parents immigrated US. Buy into Hale and Norcross
was a really significant move. Prior to the Forsome joining
(06:06):
forces to come into control of the mind its previous
controlling owners were the dominant powers in Nevada mining. These
were William C. Ralston and William Sharon, and they were
backed by the Bank of California, which Ralston had founded.
They had continued to capitalize on their wealth by making
loans to hopeful speculators for the purchase of minds or
(06:27):
stocks and minds. They weren't really hoping these people would
turn a profit from the mind They were hoping that
they would lose their money and before closed on. If
the notes weren't paid in time, then Ralston and Sharon
would take control of the mine. After it had been
foreclosed on, they would expand their own footprint. That was
actually how they had come to own Hale and Norcross
(06:47):
in the first place. They had not actually been the
owners when Fair worked there. Yeah, they definitely get characterized,
and not without reason, as kind of the mustache twirling
villains of Virginia City and the surrounding area the time.
Uh Fair, who at this point had a great deal
more agency as a controlling owner of the Hale and Norcross,
was able to run things exactly as he wished, and
(07:09):
that way it turned out to be very, very prosperous.
Because Fair had begun as a prospector and worked in
the mining industry for years at that point, and he
knew a lot about machinery. He understood every facet of
mining more deeply, perhaps than anyone else at the time.
He was also quick to take action, but he was
not impulsive He thought through all of his ideas and
(07:30):
plans completely before ever committing manpower and resources to them.
He was also completely hands on, even as a high
level executive. He would go into the minds just about
every day to inspect the progress and equipment and to
update the workers with new directives based on those inspections.
Some of this was because he obviously did not trust
(07:50):
anybody else's judgment as much as he trusted his own,
but this really cost him. Having his hand in every
level of the business meant that he did not sleep
very much and he had very little time for his
personal life. Yeah, he did get married during this time,
and we'll talk about his wife a little bit more later,
but he pretty clearly was focused on the mind and
making money. I mean he did everything from these inspections.
(08:10):
He wrote all of the checks instead of hiring a
clerker and accountant to do it. He would do like
their reports at the end of every UH fiscal session
and like literally go line by line through everything they
had spent money on. He was completely devoted to this job,
and the mind was so fruitful that it became really
apparent that James Fair and his business associates should think
(08:31):
about expanding their holdings and maybe buy up some additional
property in the area. And some of that property already
had smaller mining interests on it, and one of the
minds that they bought a controlling interest in was the
Consolidated Virginia, which they purchased from Ralston in eighteen seventy two.
Ralston's partner Sharon, thought that the purchase was going to
be deadweight for this collection of Irish businessmen. There had
(08:54):
been so much effort already poured into the Consolidated Virginia mine,
and it was believed to be dry. But it turned
out that belief was incorrect. And coming up, we're going
to talk about what happened when Fair in his company
worked the Consolidated Virginia mine. But first we will pause
for a little sponsor break. So once Fair and his
(09:19):
partners took control of Consolidated Virginia, they opted to tunnel
into the mine, and for a while it did indeed
seem like a waste of time and money, and they
would occasionally find small veins, but then they would follow
them only to find an end. But then in March
eighteen seventy three, they found a vein that widened more
and more the deeper they tunneled into it, and before
(09:41):
the news could break that the allegedly dry mine actually
contained a very significant vein fifty feet in width. At
that point Fair and mackay contacted their partners who were
in San Francisco and told them to buy any outstanding
stock in the consolidated Virginia Mind that they could. As
an aside, Fair always claimed that he had been the
one to find this vein and that he used his
(10:02):
years of knowledge and skill to really carefully follow this
vein of silver that was so thin and delicate that
it would have been impossible for somebody with less savvy
to do it. But his version leaves out the fact
that there was another man named Sam Curtis who was
the superintendent on the project and he was the one
that actually made that discovery. And additionally, other accounts say
that it was really easy to follow this vein once
(10:25):
they had stumbled across it. Yeah, there's ah. It comes
up a lot in various biographies of him that he
always describes it as a knife thin edge of vein
that he, you know, intuited, might go somewhere further, And
then other people are like, you could literally have driven
a team of horses through there. It was so easy
to find, so uh some disparity in the accounts of
(10:47):
what this vein was actually like. Then. Also, if if
you work for a publicly traded company today, this business
of buying up stock before you make a big announcement,
that's the kind of thing you have ethics training about, right.
I think that James G. Fair probably would have spat
at the idea of ethics training. That's just my theory.
(11:09):
I don't know. I don't mean to in any way
disparage the van who clearly had a lot of business acumen,
but I don't think he would have been down with
with ethics training. But back to the story. Uh So,
once Fair and McKay told their partners to buy up
interest in the mine, and remember they already had the
controlling interests, they just wanted as much of it as
they could get. But they did exactly that, and they
(11:31):
also bought as much additional property in the surrounding area
as they could, and soon the partners had amassed a
huge tract of land, which they called the Consolidated Virginia
and California. And that vein that they had struck was massive.
It came to be known as the Big Bonanza, and
just a few years after the new company was established,
their combined mind had earned a hundred and fifty million
(11:53):
dollars that is not adjusted to today's dollars that was
in the currency at the time. And along the way,
Fair had astutely invited press, rivals and brokers to all
come and look at the mine, which was all part
of driving up interest and value to ensure the best
possible position should he and his partners wish to sell so.
After this period of incredible growth, Nevada's mining industry started
(12:16):
to take on a darker image. As stock speculation led
to an economic downturn, Fair and his associates came to
be viewed as greedy manipulators of this market. Fair made
a variety of statements to the press, defending himself and
defending his partners, but their images were already pretty well tainted. Furthermore,
they had made a lot of money in part because
(12:37):
of this overvalued mining stock, and over the years, Fair
and his friend McKay continued the hands on management of
the Minds together while their partners handled finances out of
their offices in California and Farren McKay managed for a
long time to stay cordial despite James Fair's tendency to
show boat and sometimes have temperamental outbursts, and that worked
(12:58):
largely due to McKay's willing is to just sort of
navigate around such things. And they were in many ways
polar opposites, even down to their spending habits. McKay gave
away money constantly, but he had spend very little on himself. Fair,
on the other end, would spend lavishly on what we
would probably call promoting his personal brand today. He liked
to do things that made him look big and important,
(13:20):
but he was otherwise really tight with money. Fair had
diversified his fortune and invested in a number of other
business ventures. Over the years, he amassed more and more
wealth the whole time. We mentioned earlier that Fair was
a contemporary of Levi Strauss, and one space where their
stories are pretty similar is in the world of San
Francisco real estate. So just as Strauss bought up interesting
(13:42):
properties around the city to build up his holdings, Spared
at the same thing starting in eighteen sixty nine, in
Fair's case, he focused first on businesses and residential properties,
but then he started expanding his interest in his business
acumen to get involved in railroads and transit systems as well.
In eighteen seventy eight, he built the South Pacific Coast Railroad,
(14:02):
and this also included a ferry system, and it was
really a key moment in the growth of the Bay
Area because it connected San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Jose,
and Oakland in less than a decade after it was completed,
Fair sold the whole thing to the Southern Pacific Company
in eighteen eighty six, and he made himself a million
dollars in the process. Even before he sold off the
(14:23):
South Pacific Coast Railroad, he had already moved into yet
another entirely new career as a politician. In eighteen eighty one,
he was elected to the United States Senate and a
race against his mining rival William Sharon and Farah had
run on a platform that focused on the interests of
the state of Nevada, even when those interests were not
necessarily in line with his political party. The obituary that
(14:45):
ran uh it got picked up by the New York Times,
which is what I read it in, but it ran
another papers when Fair died described him as quote nominally
a Democrat, the silver minds of the state were a
huge economic driver, and as a consequence, Fair, who of
course knew all a about them, was able to prioritize
those interests to keep the state economy prosperous. And in
his campaign he told people that he didn't know anything
(15:08):
about politics, but he knew what the state and its
miners needed. But once he had his senatorial seat, he
didn't actually do much with it. It was estimated that
he had spent about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars
getting elected, but after attending some sessions dutifully for the
first few months of his term, he just sort of
seemed to check out. Eventually, he was actually spending more
(15:29):
time back in San Francisco than he was in Washington,
and even on the issue of advocating for the silver
mining industry, which he had run on as his platform,
he let another Nevada Senator, John P. Jones, take the
lead when it came to speaking on the issue. On
the Senate floor, Fair voted in favor of the Chinese
Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty one, but he wasn't especially
(15:50):
active on any other issues. He really preferred to go
back to California and gossip to all of his friends
about Washington politicians. Then when he was in Washington, he
tended to skip sessions and drink in his office with
his friends. It turned out that he just found the
Senate to be boring. At one point he said something
about how to him, like listening to a bunch of
people talk about um things like you know what a
(16:13):
person should be paid as a fair wage just bored
him to tears, and he would rather be either in
the minds or running something. He was not so much
with the legislation, But in the midst of his term
he also became the focus of a massive scandal when
his wife of twenty two years filed for divorce, and
the scandal came about because she cited habitual adultery as
(16:35):
the reason that she sought to end the marriage in
eight three. This was the first time such a charge
was made against a sitting US senator, and it was
nationwide front page news. Fair's fellow senators were horrified and
denounced him. The divorce hearings took place in early May
eight three, and the testimony was big news. That testimony
(16:56):
was also extremely damning to James g. Fair. One of
his paramours testified during the hearing, and another one provided
a deposition to the court. Fair claimed the whole thing
was a political plot that had been orchestrated by his enemies,
but he also didn't contest any of the charges that
were made against him. He agreed to the divorce, and
then when the dust settled, the judgment against him was
(17:18):
really harsh. The conditions of the divorce stated that James
would get custody of the couple's two sons, James and Charles,
and they also had two daughters, Teresa and Virginia, who
were to stay with their mother per the court's decision.
But the big news was that Mrs Fair was also
granted nearly five million dollars in cash and securities, which
is believed to be the largest divorce settlement in history
(17:39):
at that time. This was a huge loss for Fair,
not just because of the public scandal and the dissolution
of his family, but also because it led to the
dissolution of his very successful long term business partnership. William
S O'Brien had died in eighteen seventy eight, but McKay
and Flood had sided with Teresa in the divorce. Things
(18:00):
had already become strained when Fair had started working as
a senator. While he was in Washington, Theresa would look
to McKay for support in California, and by helping her,
mackay had made Fair feel insulted. Since these three men
couldn't untangle their business dealings, Fair instead contented himself by
giving his business associates some backhanded compliments in the press. Yeah,
(18:22):
he would say, you know, things along the lines are like, oh,
they've done so well for themselves, considering you know, they
started out poor, stupid humans like they did. It was
just really unkind to them. And we're going to talk
next about some of the family drama that swirled around
the Fairs after the divorce. But first we are going
to take a quick break in here from one of
our sponsors. So Fair's daughters after the divorce were raised
(18:51):
by their mother, Teresa, and she raised them to be
educated and well mannered. Fair could not really be bothered
to do the same for his sons, and that had
di astris consequences. His son Jimmy developed a serious drinking problem,
which was often reported in the press, including what sounds
to me like a terrifying night when he drank twenty
cocktails in one sitting and a doctor had to be
(19:12):
called because he passed out. Jimmy actually died very young,
and his cause of death was reported entirely differently from
paper to paper. Some claimed that he died of acute alcoholism,
others stated that he had died of suicide. Fairs relationships
with his surviving children were strained when his oldest daughter, Teresa,
who went by Tessey, got married in a high profile
(19:32):
society wedding fair. Was not invited, although he claimed that
he sent the newly weds a million dollars as a
wedding present, even though he had not been invited. Yeah,
it's unknown if that actually happened or if it was
something he just said to the press to like stir
up their interests. He kind of liked to be in
the press um, but he definitely didn't go to the
wedding fair. Retired from politics after his first term ended
(19:55):
in seven and then he settled into the work of
managing his real estate interests in San Francisco in the
surrounding area. He bought more properties, particularly money making properties
like office buildings and retail spaces that would generate rental income,
and all of his rental agreements put the onus of
maintenance and upkeep on the renters, so he was able
(20:16):
to keep most or all of that rent money rather
than funneling it back into property improvements, and this gave
him something of a slum lord reputation. His properties were
known for being run down, but he always claimed that
the real estate taxes were just far too high to
allow him any budget for refurbishment. His wife, Theresa Fair,
died in the Fair's son, Charlie, tried to get an
(20:38):
advance on the trust fund that was set up in
her will in order to pay off debts that he
had accrued purchasing race horses. Charlie had also developed a
dependency on alcohol, and in a hasty move, he married
a young woman who was rumored to be running a
brothel out of her home. All of this caused a
rift between Charlie and his sisters, as well as between
(20:59):
Charlie and his father. And James Fair had always been
a drinker. His sons inherited their problems with alcohol from him,
but in these later years of his life his reliance
on alcohol increased significantly. He also ate voraciously and not
in a healthy way. He started each day with four
boiled eggs, a dozen slices of toast, a steak, and coffee.
(21:20):
And the heavy meals and the heavy drinking really took
a toll on his health. And as he began to
reckon with the reality of his mortality, he also decided
to reconcile with his son Charlie. By Fairs health started
to decline rapidly, but even so he remained a contrarian.
When his pastor visited to discuss the sermon that he
(21:40):
might give at fairs funeral service, it made the Silver
Magnets so furious that he got out of bed. He
put on his work clothes and he watched his office
to work, and he did that for two more days,
but those were his last trips out of the house.
Even though he knew that he was probably going to
die soon, having someone else tell him that just made
him irate. Um so he kind of wanted to prove
(22:02):
them wrong. But uh time eventually caught up with him.
He caught what seemed initially to just be a cold
in December, but he couldn't seem to recover from it.
He was also diagnosed with diabetes and kidney disease, and
soon after that illness, around Christmas of December, he fell
into an unconscious state from which he never awoke. On December,
(22:26):
James Fair died at Lick House that was one of
his homes in San Francisco. At the time of his death,
his estate was valued at an estimated forty million dollars.
In his will, he arranged for each of his children
to be supported by the estate with a regular income
for the rest of their lives. In the event of
his daughter's deaths, their inheritance would pass to their children,
(22:46):
and in the case of his son Charles dying, his
share would be split between his sisters. It would not
go to Charlie's wife, Maud or any children of that marriage. Yeah,
there had been hoped, since he had reconciled with Charlie
that he might also find only accept Charlie's wife, but
apparently not so much. Charlie had sent word to his sisters,
both of whom were living in New York at the time,
(23:07):
that their father was about to die, but they had
refused to answer their estranged brother because they had not
reconciled with him. They instead sent word to other family
friends in San Francisco, though about the situation via telegraph.
Fair also left money to his siblings. He left his
sisters Mary Anderson and Margaret Jay Caruther's two thousand dollars each,
(23:29):
as well as fifty thousand dollars to his brother William
Fair and twenty thousand dollars to his brother Edward. Orphan
asylums were also beneficiaries. Fair made provisions for orphanages run
by different religious denominations in the city of San Francisco
to each have their own bequest. Those are not massive bequests.
They were large for the time, but when you consider
how much money he was doling out, it kind of
(23:50):
seems like I should give some to charity so people
don't think of a jury. It's like, here have two
hundred fifty thousand dollars. Oh you orphans thousand. Um, I'm
not judging, yes, I am um. Fair also put some
really interesting stipulations into his will about potential efforts to
break said will. So, according to how it was written,
(24:12):
if any of his children contested the will, their share
would automatically go to the other two siblings, and if
anyone came forward claiming either to be James Phair's illegitimate
child or claiming to be a common law wife. They
would just be issued fifty dollars and get nothing more.
What Fair didn't anticipate with those stipulations was all three
of his children contesting the will in a sort of
(24:35):
unified front. None of them wanted to deal with trustees
and an income that was doled out from a trust.
All of them wanted to just have their inheritance, and
then to make matters even more contentious, the will vanished
from the county Clerk's office just a month after James
Fhair died. It was replaced with a blank piece of
paper in the envelope that the will had been filed in.
(24:56):
A lot of people quit were questioned as police tried
to piece together who had access to the envelope who
could have made the switch. Nothing came of the investigation,
and the will was never recovered, and the trustees claimed
that the Fair children must have taken the will so
that the estate would be split among them. The siblings
believed that the trustees had stolen the will because they
(25:17):
knew that it would be revealed as fraudulent, and as
all of these accusations were made and the investigation stalled,
a woman named Neddie Craven, who was the principle of
the Mission Grammar School, came forward and claimed that she
had a will that Fair maide after the one that
had disappeared. This was a handwritten will, so the press
nicknamed it the pencil Will, and it left the estate
(25:39):
to the children. The will had allegedly been written because
Mrs Craven had spoken to James Fair about a bill
that was related to school teachers pension funds, and he
had written this copy to include a bequest of fifty
thousand dollars to the pension fund. While the Fair family
initially supported Mrs Craven and her documents, soon she produced
more hand and written documents, claiming them to be the
(26:02):
writing of James Fair. Two of them left her properties
and one declared her his wife, and then that set
off a whole series of events that ended up in
a very expensive trial. Eventually, Craven caved under this financial pressure.
She handed over the handwritten deeds and marriage declaration in
return to for a small sum of cash. And when
(26:22):
she initially appeared with a handwritten will that seemed to
convey exactly what his kids always wanted, they were like, yes,
this woman is the real deal. And then when she
was like, he also left me two very big rental properties,
they were like, wait, wait a minute. And then she
was like, and I'm his common law wife. They're like
hold the phone. And it became like a whole big,
crazy thing. But as the craven issue receded, numerous other
(26:45):
claimants to Fair's life and fortune emerged. Multiple women claiming
to have been engaged or common law married to James
Fair came forward, as well as a number of people
claiming to be his children. The nineteenth century passed into
the twentieth century before this will was settled and the
Fair children finally got their inheritance. So really, a lot
(27:06):
of people liked him. He was capable of being friendly
with pretty much everybody, even making people he had never
met before feel like they were his old friends. His
career in minding had been so successful in part because
he treated everybody the same, regardless of whether they were
a wealthy executive or a worker down in the mind.
But that was only one side of his personality. The
(27:27):
other side is a Fair that was fairly conceded about
his own skills and intellect, so in some ways it
kind of seems like he treated most people equally because
he saw everyone as equally less impressive than himself. He
was not above taking advantage of someone that he thought
was foolish in business, and he would later crow about
business deals that were far more favorable to him than
(27:48):
the other involved party. He was shrewd and manipulative even
with his family members. At one point, he gave a
fake tip to his wife about a stock, knowing that
she would not only buy with her own personal savings,
but also tell other people about him. And when all
of those people started buying and the stock was hot,
Fair sold his shares and made a profit. His wife
(28:10):
ended up losing her life savings, and he was not
especially sympathetic about that loss, which might be another reason
that she wanted to divorce him, and another thing that
would be in ethics class. Yes, that ability to ingratiate
himself to other people and just charm them to pieces
was very real, though, and it was something that he
really used to his advantage. A lot of his most
(28:33):
successful business dealings were built around relationships that he had
fostered with this very genial side to his personality. Yeah,
he was definitely two men in one uh the obituaries
that appeared in various papers after James G. Fair died
all noted what an accomplished man he was, how astute
his business mind was, and how incredibly skilled he was mechanically.
(28:55):
But they didn't really paint a rosy picture of the man.
A lot of them said a lot of bad things
about him as well, and one of his acquaintances described
Fair as a master mechanic, a shrewd financier, and quote
from early childhood, more interested in the affairs of James G.
Fair than any other soul on earth. Oh James Fair,
(29:15):
you self involved beast? Do you have some listener mail?
I do have mail, and it's short and sweet, but
it's actually savory. Is from our listener, whose name I'm
not sure how to pronounce. I'm going to guess theren
who writes, Hello, ladies, thank you for the hard work
you do. Even though I've only been a listener for
about six months, I've loved everything I've heard, and I'm
slowly making my way through every episode. The reason I'm
(29:37):
writing is I recently listened to your archived episode on
Cheese while working on a report on Wisconsin with the
main focus being it's cheese. This was completely unintentional and unplanned,
but I slowly grew more and more hungry for cheese
as I worked on the report and listened to the episode.
After finishing, I ran to the refrigerator and grabbed any
cheese I could find. This was at eleven three pm. Anyway,
(29:58):
thanks again for all you do. It helps me make
my schoolwork, hobbies, and commute much less monotonous. I see
no issue with eating cheese far later. It's a good
thing I am not a magua, because I would turn
into a monster's kremlin if you would like. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so
at History Podcast at Houston Works dot com. You can
(30:18):
also find us everywhere on social media as Missed in History.
Missed in History dot com is also the address for
our website, so that is the u r L Missed
in History dot com. If you would like to subscribe
to the show, we highly encourage doing so. You can
do that on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in
(30:42):
History Class is a production of I Heart Radios. How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson.
So DRAYZ. Back in the fall, when I was visiting
San Francisco, Uh, as you recall, we ended our tour
(00:22):
there and then I stayed for a week because I
love that city. Um. But the hotel that we were
staying in had a photo of Senator James G. Fair
framed and sitting on a little um piece of furniture
in the parlor, and my interest was immediately sparked because
there was no context for this, which is they're just
sitting there. There's just there. Uh. And so I asked
around and it turned out that Fair had actually paid
(00:44):
for that building to be established as a boarding school
in eight ninety and that school was run by a
teacher named Mary Lake, and there were rumors at the
time that she and Fair were romantically involved. They both
denied these, but incidentally, Mary Lake allegedly haunts that hotel.
All she never visited me, to the best of my knowledge. Uh,
(01:04):
we didn't see her. But I then was kind of
left with the desire to know a lot more about
James G. Fair, and it turned out as I did
some digging. Oh, he was a piece of work. Uh.
He was a contemporary of Levi Strauss. He was living
and working in San Francisco around the same time as
the Denham Magnet. But though Fair often appears on lists
(01:25):
of the richest men in US history, he just doesn't
have the same level of name recognition, and so I
thought it might be fun to do an episode on him.
But spoiler alert, it's unlikely that you're going to come
away from this episode feeling warm and fuzzy about James G.
Fair the way you might have after the Levi Strouss episode.
He's not quite as magnanimous and lovely a man. Yeah,
(01:46):
if your primary uh affection is for money and the
making thereof, you might be super into it, maybe at
all costs, regardless of your search for money. Fair story
starts in Kloer County, Torone in Ireland, where he was
born on December three, thirty one, and his father's name
(02:09):
was also James Fair. His mother's maiden name was Graham
and that's where he got his middle name. Yeah, we
don't know her first name any longer. The records don't
seem to clearly indicate what her first name was. But
when James was twelve, his family immigrated to the United
States and they lived briefly in Geneva, Illinois. After finishing
his early schooling in Geneva, Fair went on to study
(02:31):
both business and science in Chicago, but the California gold
rush captured his attention and ambition when that whole thing
blew up, and so at the age of eighteen, Fair
left Illinois to seek his fortune in mining. At first,
he worked in place our mining, and that is using
water to excavate and recover the deposit that you're trying
(02:51):
to get. At the most basic form place our mining
is panning, but there are much larger scale and more
industrial forms of place our mining as well. He did
okay in these efforts. He made a little bit of money,
but it was never quite the major income that he
was hoping for, and Fair floundered around a little bit.
Once he decided that gold might not be the road
to wealth for him. He tried mining for courts, because
(03:13):
a lot of courts was part of the source for
where all of these gold mines were coming from. But
he only met with a little bit of success, and
then he actually gave farming a world for a little
while on a plot near Petaluma, California, but that was
similarly unfulfilling and not really very profitable, and he gave
up after six months. In the early eighteen sixties, he
(03:33):
shifted his gears again away from gold and courts and
agriculture and California. This time he set his sights on Nevada.
In the late eighteen fifties, silver loads had been discovered
in Nevada, and Fair was eager to be one of
the first people to capitalize on the silver trade. Yeah,
he didn't run out there right as these silver loads
were being discovered. He kind of wanted to get a
(03:54):
sense of the whole situation and if it was really
a viable thing, since gold had not worked out. But
once he realized like, oh, this is a very real opportunity,
he was on top of it. It was a really
smart move, as he was much more successful in silver
mining than he had been in gold mining, although I
should point out that many of these mines were also
producing both silver angld, but silver was just what was
(04:16):
making the most money. He went to Virginia City Nevada,
which is south of Reno. It's to the east of
Lake Tahoe's northern tip and Fair worked prospecting in Virginia
City for five years on his own, but in eighteen
sixty five a corporate enterprise hired him as it's superintendent,
and that mine was the oper Mine, named after King
Solomon's Oh Fear mine from which so much wealth had sprung.
(04:39):
Soon Fair was showing just how good he was managing
the over mines, business interests and day to day functions,
and that skill attracted the attentions of other mining operations.
He was hired as director of the Hale and Norcross mine.
He also became friends with John W. McKay. His work
at Hale and Norcross turned it from something that just
(04:59):
was turning a profit into a valuable venture. It resulted
in two billion dollars over the course of two years.
That money didn't go back to Fair, though it went
to the company. In eighteen sixties seven, Fair and Hale
and Norcross severed their relationship for reasons that have never
been totally clear. Yeah, there are a lot of theories
about maybe him being frustrated that he wasn't really getting
(05:23):
much of the profit and that he kind of just
told them to go take a hike, or that he
may have been making noises like that and they told
him to go take a hike. We don't really know
what happened exactly, but Fair and his friend McKay, who
had also been working in mining towns, joined forces with
San Francisco stockbrokers James C. Flood and W. S. O'Brien
(05:43):
to buy a controlling interest in the Hale and Norcross
mine in eighteen sixty eight, and that fore man partnership
eventually came to be known by the nickname the Silver Kings.
All of them were Irish. James Flood was not born
in Ireland, but he was born in New York shortly
after his parents immigrated US. Buy into Hale and Norcross
was a really significant move. Prior to the Forsome joining
(06:06):
forces to come into control of the mind its previous
controlling owners were the dominant powers in Nevada mining. These
were William C. Ralston and William Sharon, and they were
backed by the Bank of California, which Ralston had founded.
They had continued to capitalize on their wealth by making
loans to hopeful speculators for the purchase of minds or
(06:27):
stocks and minds. They weren't really hoping these people would
turn a profit from the mind They were hoping that
they would lose their money and before closed on. If
the notes weren't paid in time, then Ralston and Sharon
would take control of the mine. After it had been
foreclosed on, they would expand their own footprint. That was
actually how they had come to own Hale and Norcross
(06:47):
in the first place. They had not actually been the
owners when Fair worked there. Yeah, they definitely get characterized,
and not without reason, as kind of the mustache twirling
villains of Virginia City and the surrounding area the time.
Uh Fair, who at this point had a great deal
more agency as a controlling owner of the Hale and Norcross,
was able to run things exactly as he wished, and
(07:09):
that way it turned out to be very, very prosperous.
Because Fair had begun as a prospector and worked in
the mining industry for years at that point, and he
knew a lot about machinery. He understood every facet of
mining more deeply, perhaps than anyone else at the time.
He was also quick to take action, but he was
not impulsive He thought through all of his ideas and
(07:30):
plans completely before ever committing manpower and resources to them.
He was also completely hands on, even as a high
level executive. He would go into the minds just about
every day to inspect the progress and equipment and to
update the workers with new directives based on those inspections.
Some of this was because he obviously did not trust
(07:50):
anybody else's judgment as much as he trusted his own,
but this really cost him. Having his hand in every
level of the business meant that he did not sleep
very much and he had very little time for his
personal life. Yeah, he did get married during this time,
and we'll talk about his wife a little bit more later,
but he pretty clearly was focused on the mind and
making money. I mean he did everything from these inspections.
(08:10):
He wrote all of the checks instead of hiring a
clerker and accountant to do it. He would do like
their reports at the end of every UH fiscal session
and like literally go line by line through everything they
had spent money on. He was completely devoted to this job,
and the mind was so fruitful that it became really
apparent that James Fair and his business associates should think
(08:31):
about expanding their holdings and maybe buy up some additional
property in the area. And some of that property already
had smaller mining interests on it, and one of the
minds that they bought a controlling interest in was the
Consolidated Virginia, which they purchased from Ralston in eighteen seventy two.
Ralston's partner Sharon, thought that the purchase was going to
be deadweight for this collection of Irish businessmen. There had
(08:54):
been so much effort already poured into the Consolidated Virginia mine,
and it was believed to be dry. But it turned
out that belief was incorrect. And coming up, we're going
to talk about what happened when Fair in his company
worked the Consolidated Virginia mine. But first we will pause
for a little sponsor break. So once Fair and his
(09:19):
partners took control of Consolidated Virginia, they opted to tunnel
into the mine, and for a while it did indeed
seem like a waste of time and money, and they
would occasionally find small veins, but then they would follow
them only to find an end. But then in March
eighteen seventy three, they found a vein that widened more
and more the deeper they tunneled into it, and before
(09:41):
the news could break that the allegedly dry mine actually
contained a very significant vein fifty feet in width. At
that point Fair and mackay contacted their partners who were
in San Francisco and told them to buy any outstanding
stock in the consolidated Virginia Mind that they could. As
an aside, Fair always claimed that he had been the
one to find this vein and that he used his
(10:02):
years of knowledge and skill to really carefully follow this
vein of silver that was so thin and delicate that
it would have been impossible for somebody with less savvy
to do it. But his version leaves out the fact
that there was another man named Sam Curtis who was
the superintendent on the project and he was the one
that actually made that discovery. And additionally, other accounts say
that it was really easy to follow this vein once
(10:25):
they had stumbled across it. Yeah, there's ah. It comes
up a lot in various biographies of him that he
always describes it as a knife thin edge of vein
that he, you know, intuited, might go somewhere further, And
then other people are like, you could literally have driven
a team of horses through there. It was so easy
to find, so uh some disparity in the accounts of
(10:47):
what this vein was actually like. Then. Also, if if
you work for a publicly traded company today, this business
of buying up stock before you make a big announcement,
that's the kind of thing you have ethics training about, right.
I think that James G. Fair probably would have spat
at the idea of ethics training. That's just my theory.
(11:09):
I don't know. I don't mean to in any way
disparage the van who clearly had a lot of business acumen,
but I don't think he would have been down with
with ethics training. But back to the story. Uh So,
once Fair and McKay told their partners to buy up
interest in the mine, and remember they already had the
controlling interests, they just wanted as much of it as
they could get. But they did exactly that, and they
(11:31):
also bought as much additional property in the surrounding area
as they could, and soon the partners had amassed a
huge tract of land, which they called the Consolidated Virginia
and California. And that vein that they had struck was massive.
It came to be known as the Big Bonanza, and
just a few years after the new company was established,
their combined mind had earned a hundred and fifty million
(11:53):
dollars that is not adjusted to today's dollars that was
in the currency at the time. And along the way,
Fair had astutely invited press, rivals and brokers to all
come and look at the mine, which was all part
of driving up interest and value to ensure the best
possible position should he and his partners wish to sell so.
After this period of incredible growth, Nevada's mining industry started
(12:16):
to take on a darker image. As stock speculation led
to an economic downturn, Fair and his associates came to
be viewed as greedy manipulators of this market. Fair made
a variety of statements to the press, defending himself and
defending his partners, but their images were already pretty well tainted. Furthermore,
they had made a lot of money in part because
(12:37):
of this overvalued mining stock, and over the years, Fair
and his friend McKay continued the hands on management of
the Minds together while their partners handled finances out of
their offices in California and Farren McKay managed for a
long time to stay cordial despite James Fair's tendency to
show boat and sometimes have temperamental outbursts, and that worked
(12:58):
largely due to McKay's willing is to just sort of
navigate around such things. And they were in many ways
polar opposites, even down to their spending habits. McKay gave
away money constantly, but he had spend very little on himself. Fair,
on the other end, would spend lavishly on what we
would probably call promoting his personal brand today. He liked
to do things that made him look big and important,
(13:20):
but he was otherwise really tight with money. Fair had
diversified his fortune and invested in a number of other
business ventures. Over the years, he amassed more and more
wealth the whole time. We mentioned earlier that Fair was
a contemporary of Levi Strauss, and one space where their
stories are pretty similar is in the world of San
Francisco real estate. So just as Strauss bought up interesting
(13:42):
properties around the city to build up his holdings, Spared
at the same thing starting in eighteen sixty nine, in
Fair's case, he focused first on businesses and residential properties,
but then he started expanding his interest in his business
acumen to get involved in railroads and transit systems as well.
In eighteen seventy eight, he built the South Pacific Coast Railroad,
(14:02):
and this also included a ferry system, and it was
really a key moment in the growth of the Bay
Area because it connected San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Jose,
and Oakland in less than a decade after it was completed,
Fair sold the whole thing to the Southern Pacific Company
in eighteen eighty six, and he made himself a million
dollars in the process. Even before he sold off the
(14:23):
South Pacific Coast Railroad, he had already moved into yet
another entirely new career as a politician. In eighteen eighty one,
he was elected to the United States Senate and a
race against his mining rival William Sharon and Farah had
run on a platform that focused on the interests of
the state of Nevada, even when those interests were not
necessarily in line with his political party. The obituary that
(14:45):
ran uh it got picked up by the New York Times,
which is what I read it in, but it ran
another papers when Fair died described him as quote nominally
a Democrat, the silver minds of the state were a
huge economic driver, and as a consequence, Fair, who of
course knew all a about them, was able to prioritize
those interests to keep the state economy prosperous. And in
his campaign he told people that he didn't know anything
(15:08):
about politics, but he knew what the state and its
miners needed. But once he had his senatorial seat, he
didn't actually do much with it. It was estimated that
he had spent about three hundred and fifty thousand dollars
getting elected, but after attending some sessions dutifully for the
first few months of his term, he just sort of
seemed to check out. Eventually, he was actually spending more
(15:29):
time back in San Francisco than he was in Washington,
and even on the issue of advocating for the silver
mining industry, which he had run on as his platform,
he let another Nevada Senator, John P. Jones, take the
lead when it came to speaking on the issue. On
the Senate floor, Fair voted in favor of the Chinese
Exclusion Act of eighteen eighty one, but he wasn't especially
(15:50):
active on any other issues. He really preferred to go
back to California and gossip to all of his friends
about Washington politicians. Then when he was in Washington, he
tended to skip sessions and drink in his office with
his friends. It turned out that he just found the
Senate to be boring. At one point he said something
about how to him, like listening to a bunch of
people talk about um things like you know what a
(16:13):
person should be paid as a fair wage just bored
him to tears, and he would rather be either in
the minds or running something. He was not so much
with the legislation, But in the midst of his term
he also became the focus of a massive scandal when
his wife of twenty two years filed for divorce, and
the scandal came about because she cited habitual adultery as
(16:35):
the reason that she sought to end the marriage in
eight three. This was the first time such a charge
was made against a sitting US senator, and it was
nationwide front page news. Fair's fellow senators were horrified and
denounced him. The divorce hearings took place in early May
eight three, and the testimony was big news. That testimony
(16:56):
was also extremely damning to James g. Fair. One of
his paramours testified during the hearing, and another one provided
a deposition to the court. Fair claimed the whole thing
was a political plot that had been orchestrated by his enemies,
but he also didn't contest any of the charges that
were made against him. He agreed to the divorce, and
then when the dust settled, the judgment against him was
(17:18):
really harsh. The conditions of the divorce stated that James
would get custody of the couple's two sons, James and Charles,
and they also had two daughters, Teresa and Virginia, who
were to stay with their mother per the court's decision.
But the big news was that Mrs Fair was also
granted nearly five million dollars in cash and securities, which
is believed to be the largest divorce settlement in history
(17:39):
at that time. This was a huge loss for Fair,
not just because of the public scandal and the dissolution
of his family, but also because it led to the
dissolution of his very successful long term business partnership. William
S O'Brien had died in eighteen seventy eight, but McKay
and Flood had sided with Teresa in the divorce. Things
(18:00):
had already become strained when Fair had started working as
a senator. While he was in Washington, Theresa would look
to McKay for support in California, and by helping her,
mackay had made Fair feel insulted. Since these three men
couldn't untangle their business dealings, Fair instead contented himself by
giving his business associates some backhanded compliments in the press. Yeah,
(18:22):
he would say, you know, things along the lines are like, oh,
they've done so well for themselves, considering you know, they
started out poor, stupid humans like they did. It was
just really unkind to them. And we're going to talk
next about some of the family drama that swirled around
the Fairs after the divorce. But first we are going
to take a quick break in here from one of
our sponsors. So Fair's daughters after the divorce were raised
(18:51):
by their mother, Teresa, and she raised them to be
educated and well mannered. Fair could not really be bothered
to do the same for his sons, and that had
di astris consequences. His son Jimmy developed a serious drinking problem,
which was often reported in the press, including what sounds
to me like a terrifying night when he drank twenty
cocktails in one sitting and a doctor had to be
(19:12):
called because he passed out. Jimmy actually died very young,
and his cause of death was reported entirely differently from
paper to paper. Some claimed that he died of acute alcoholism,
others stated that he had died of suicide. Fairs relationships
with his surviving children were strained when his oldest daughter, Teresa,
who went by Tessey, got married in a high profile
(19:32):
society wedding fair. Was not invited, although he claimed that
he sent the newly weds a million dollars as a
wedding present, even though he had not been invited. Yeah,
it's unknown if that actually happened or if it was
something he just said to the press to like stir
up their interests. He kind of liked to be in
the press um, but he definitely didn't go to the
wedding fair. Retired from politics after his first term ended
(19:55):
in seven and then he settled into the work of
managing his real estate interests in San Francisco in the
surrounding area. He bought more properties, particularly money making properties
like office buildings and retail spaces that would generate rental income,
and all of his rental agreements put the onus of
maintenance and upkeep on the renters, so he was able
(20:16):
to keep most or all of that rent money rather
than funneling it back into property improvements, and this gave
him something of a slum lord reputation. His properties were
known for being run down, but he always claimed that
the real estate taxes were just far too high to
allow him any budget for refurbishment. His wife, Theresa Fair,
died in the Fair's son, Charlie, tried to get an
(20:38):
advance on the trust fund that was set up in
her will in order to pay off debts that he
had accrued purchasing race horses. Charlie had also developed a
dependency on alcohol, and in a hasty move, he married
a young woman who was rumored to be running a
brothel out of her home. All of this caused a
rift between Charlie and his sisters, as well as between
(20:59):
Charlie and his father. And James Fair had always been
a drinker. His sons inherited their problems with alcohol from him,
but in these later years of his life his reliance
on alcohol increased significantly. He also ate voraciously and not
in a healthy way. He started each day with four
boiled eggs, a dozen slices of toast, a steak, and coffee.
(21:20):
And the heavy meals and the heavy drinking really took
a toll on his health. And as he began to
reckon with the reality of his mortality, he also decided
to reconcile with his son Charlie. By Fairs health started
to decline rapidly, but even so he remained a contrarian.
When his pastor visited to discuss the sermon that he
(21:40):
might give at fairs funeral service, it made the Silver
Magnets so furious that he got out of bed. He
put on his work clothes and he watched his office
to work, and he did that for two more days,
but those were his last trips out of the house.
Even though he knew that he was probably going to
die soon, having someone else tell him that just made
him irate. Um so he kind of wanted to prove
(22:02):
them wrong. But uh time eventually caught up with him.
He caught what seemed initially to just be a cold
in December, but he couldn't seem to recover from it.
He was also diagnosed with diabetes and kidney disease, and
soon after that illness, around Christmas of December, he fell
into an unconscious state from which he never awoke. On December,
(22:26):
James Fair died at Lick House that was one of
his homes in San Francisco. At the time of his death,
his estate was valued at an estimated forty million dollars.
In his will, he arranged for each of his children
to be supported by the estate with a regular income
for the rest of their lives. In the event of
his daughter's deaths, their inheritance would pass to their children,
(22:46):
and in the case of his son Charles dying, his
share would be split between his sisters. It would not
go to Charlie's wife, Maud or any children of that marriage. Yeah,
there had been hoped, since he had reconciled with Charlie
that he might also find only accept Charlie's wife, but
apparently not so much. Charlie had sent word to his sisters,
both of whom were living in New York at the time,
(23:07):
that their father was about to die, but they had
refused to answer their estranged brother because they had not
reconciled with him. They instead sent word to other family
friends in San Francisco, though about the situation via telegraph.
Fair also left money to his siblings. He left his
sisters Mary Anderson and Margaret Jay Caruther's two thousand dollars each,
(23:29):
as well as fifty thousand dollars to his brother William
Fair and twenty thousand dollars to his brother Edward. Orphan
asylums were also beneficiaries. Fair made provisions for orphanages run
by different religious denominations in the city of San Francisco
to each have their own bequest. Those are not massive bequests.
They were large for the time, but when you consider
how much money he was doling out, it kind of
(23:50):
seems like I should give some to charity so people
don't think of a jury. It's like, here have two
hundred fifty thousand dollars. Oh you orphans thousand. Um, I'm
not judging, yes, I am um. Fair also put some
really interesting stipulations into his will about potential efforts to
break said will. So, according to how it was written,
(24:12):
if any of his children contested the will, their share
would automatically go to the other two siblings, and if
anyone came forward claiming either to be James Phair's illegitimate
child or claiming to be a common law wife. They
would just be issued fifty dollars and get nothing more.
What Fair didn't anticipate with those stipulations was all three
of his children contesting the will in a sort of
(24:35):
unified front. None of them wanted to deal with trustees
and an income that was doled out from a trust.
All of them wanted to just have their inheritance, and
then to make matters even more contentious, the will vanished
from the county Clerk's office just a month after James
Fhair died. It was replaced with a blank piece of
paper in the envelope that the will had been filed in.
(24:56):
A lot of people quit were questioned as police tried
to piece together who had access to the envelope who
could have made the switch. Nothing came of the investigation,
and the will was never recovered, and the trustees claimed
that the Fair children must have taken the will so
that the estate would be split among them. The siblings
believed that the trustees had stolen the will because they
(25:17):
knew that it would be revealed as fraudulent, and as
all of these accusations were made and the investigation stalled,
a woman named Neddie Craven, who was the principle of
the Mission Grammar School, came forward and claimed that she
had a will that Fair maide after the one that
had disappeared. This was a handwritten will, so the press
nicknamed it the pencil Will, and it left the estate
(25:39):
to the children. The will had allegedly been written because
Mrs Craven had spoken to James Fair about a bill
that was related to school teachers pension funds, and he
had written this copy to include a bequest of fifty
thousand dollars to the pension fund. While the Fair family
initially supported Mrs Craven and her documents, soon she produced
more hand and written documents, claiming them to be the
(26:02):
writing of James Fair. Two of them left her properties
and one declared her his wife, and then that set
off a whole series of events that ended up in
a very expensive trial. Eventually, Craven caved under this financial pressure.
She handed over the handwritten deeds and marriage declaration in
return to for a small sum of cash. And when
(26:22):
she initially appeared with a handwritten will that seemed to
convey exactly what his kids always wanted, they were like, yes,
this woman is the real deal. And then when she
was like, he also left me two very big rental properties,
they were like, wait, wait a minute. And then she
was like, and I'm his common law wife. They're like
hold the phone. And it became like a whole big,
crazy thing. But as the craven issue receded, numerous other
(26:45):
claimants to Fair's life and fortune emerged. Multiple women claiming
to have been engaged or common law married to James
Fair came forward, as well as a number of people
claiming to be his children. The nineteenth century passed into
the twentieth century before this will was settled and the
Fair children finally got their inheritance. So really, a lot
(27:06):
of people liked him. He was capable of being friendly
with pretty much everybody, even making people he had never
met before feel like they were his old friends. His
career in minding had been so successful in part because
he treated everybody the same, regardless of whether they were
a wealthy executive or a worker down in the mind.
But that was only one side of his personality. The
(27:27):
other side is a Fair that was fairly conceded about
his own skills and intellect, so in some ways it
kind of seems like he treated most people equally because
he saw everyone as equally less impressive than himself. He
was not above taking advantage of someone that he thought
was foolish in business, and he would later crow about
business deals that were far more favorable to him than
(27:48):
the other involved party. He was shrewd and manipulative even
with his family members. At one point, he gave a
fake tip to his wife about a stock, knowing that
she would not only buy with her own personal savings,
but also tell other people about him. And when all
of those people started buying and the stock was hot,
Fair sold his shares and made a profit. His wife
(28:10):
ended up losing her life savings, and he was not
especially sympathetic about that loss, which might be another reason
that she wanted to divorce him, and another thing that
would be in ethics class. Yes, that ability to ingratiate
himself to other people and just charm them to pieces
was very real, though, and it was something that he
really used to his advantage. A lot of his most
(28:33):
successful business dealings were built around relationships that he had
fostered with this very genial side to his personality. Yeah,
he was definitely two men in one uh the obituaries
that appeared in various papers after James G. Fair died
all noted what an accomplished man he was, how astute
his business mind was, and how incredibly skilled he was mechanically.
(28:55):
But they didn't really paint a rosy picture of the man.
A lot of them said a lot of bad things
about him as well, and one of his acquaintances described
Fair as a master mechanic, a shrewd financier, and quote
from early childhood, more interested in the affairs of James G.
Fair than any other soul on earth. Oh James Fair,
(29:15):
you self involved beast? Do you have some listener mail?
I do have mail, and it's short and sweet, but
it's actually savory. Is from our listener, whose name I'm
not sure how to pronounce. I'm going to guess theren
who writes, Hello, ladies, thank you for the hard work
you do. Even though I've only been a listener for
about six months, I've loved everything I've heard, and I'm
slowly making my way through every episode. The reason I'm
(29:37):
writing is I recently listened to your archived episode on
Cheese while working on a report on Wisconsin with the
main focus being it's cheese. This was completely unintentional and unplanned,
but I slowly grew more and more hungry for cheese
as I worked on the report and listened to the episode.
After finishing, I ran to the refrigerator and grabbed any
cheese I could find. This was at eleven three pm. Anyway,
(29:58):
thanks again for all you do. It helps me make
my schoolwork, hobbies, and commute much less monotonous. I see
no issue with eating cheese far later. It's a good
thing I am not a magua, because I would turn
into a monster's kremlin if you would like. If you
would like to write to us, you can do so
at History Podcast at Houston Works dot com. You can
(30:18):
also find us everywhere on social media as Missed in History.
Missed in History dot com is also the address for
our website, so that is the u r L Missed
in History dot com. If you would like to subscribe
to the show, we highly encourage doing so. You can
do that on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in
(30:42):
History Class is a production of I Heart Radios. How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio visit
the I heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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