August 31, 2021 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Kentucky journalist Sam Terry tells the story of William King Solomon, a gravedigger who may have saved the town of Lexington during the Cholera epidemic of 1833; and TJ Stiles tells the humble story of Cornelius Vanderbilt and how he became one of the richest men in U.S. history;
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Leigh Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on the show,
including your story. Send them to our American Network dot org.
They're some of our favorites. And this next story comes
to us with the help of John Elfner, a high
school history teacher and a regular contributor to our show.
John is always on the hunt for a good story,
(00:30):
and recently he asked his uncle, Henry, a Kentucky horse breeder,
if he had one. Henry show John a recent newspaper
article about William King Solomon, a gravedigger who may have
saved the town of Lexington during the cholera epidemic of
eighteen thirty three. Kentucky journalist Sam Terry tells the story
(00:50):
of the man they called King Solomon. In November of
eighteen fifty four, the Reverend William M. Pratt recorded in
his diary, I preached the funeral today of old King Solomon,
seventy nine years old. He was born the same year
with Henry Clay, and had drunk whiskey enough to float
(01:10):
a man o war. He was once a person of
considerable enterprise and business, but he had been given to
drink a great many years, and yet was inoffensive and
of great integrity. Quite a number of citizens attended his funeral,
and he had a good coffin worth thirty dollars, and
some seventeen carriages processed to the cemetery. The deceased was
(01:35):
William King Solomon, a Virginian native who claimed to have
been a boyhood acquaintance of Harry, as he called Henry Clay,
jesting that his own work as a digger of sellers
and cisterns was less elevated than the famous statesman. His
loyalty to Clay was unprecedented. When one of Clay's opponents
(01:56):
for re election offered strong drink to in exchange for
his vote, Solomon took him up on the offer and
then proceeded to vote for Clay. When asked if he
had voted as agreed, Solomon replied, you may have been
foolish enough to try to bribe me, but I'm not
foolish enough to vote for you. During Solomon's lowest time
(02:20):
of life, his wife died and his son ran away,
sending him into a liquor filled existence that reduced him
to a vagabond, whom Lexingtonians nicknamed King Solomon, by eighteen
thirty three, Solomon's existence, living on the streets and intoxicated
led a local judge to sell him as a servant
(02:41):
for a period of nine months. Solomon's purchaser was the
least likely of buyers. Aunt Charlotte was a free black
woman who had apparently known Solomon in Virginia when he
was a free white male and she was an enslaved
black female, her owners having given her freedom and bequeathed
(03:03):
her some land. She supported herself by selling baked goods.
At Solomon's auction. Two Transylvania Medical College students bid on Solomon,
viewing him as being near the end of his life
and a future cadaver for their studies. Aunt Charlotte was
the winning bidder for Solomon. Her exact bid remains a mystery.
(03:27):
Some sources say she paid thirteen cents, while others claim
it was thirteen dollars, and yet another maintains it was
fifty cents. Whatever the price, King Solomon the White Vagrant
became the temporary property of Aunt Charlotte, the free woman
of color, setting in motion one of Kentucky's renowned tales
(03:49):
of the past. Aunt Charlotte freed Solomon, and true to
his addiction, he managed to acquire some liquor before wandering
back to her home, where he passed out. When Solomon awakened,
he found the town of Lexington in distress, with people
dying of cholera, one of the most feared maladies of
(04:10):
the early decades of the nineteenth century, referred to as
Asiatic cholera due to its origin in the Far East.
Cholera is contracted by ingesting the vibrio choleria microbe. The
a water that is contaminated with human feces now at
this time in eighteen thirty three, the town branch ran
(04:34):
through Lexington, and heavy rains caused its banks to overflow,
while privies overflowed into the ground, creating a deadly mixture
that poured into sinkholes, only to emerge through springs and
other sources of drinking water. There was little help for
the victims. Lexington's only hospital at the time was the
(04:57):
Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum. The town's physicians were principally faculty
members at Transylvania's Medical College. Three of the physicians died,
another was out of town and learning of the epidemic
chose not to return, and yet another rendered himself useless
after a fall. While trying to care for the sick
(05:19):
and the dying, the Lexington Observer and Reporter published the
names of more than five hundred victims in a town
with a population of six thousand. The hungover Solomon found
that Aunt Charlotte, like most Lexington residents, was packing to
evacuate the town. Historians have pondered how Solomon could have
(05:42):
managed to avoid contracting cholera, most drolly concluding that his
body was so well fortified with alcohol he was immune
to the disease. Solomon, however, refused to leave, and he
began bearing the dead. As the grave diggers had left.
With thousands of other residents. Victims of cholera were not
(06:04):
afforded the luxury of funerals or even coffins, with many
bodies being wrapped in the bed linens on which they
had died. Dozens of casualties were piled up near the
old episcopal burying ground on Third Street. Discerning the need,
Solomon began digging graves to bury hundreds of bodies and
in turn becoming the hero of Lexington. King Solomon continued
(06:30):
to live in Lexington until his death in eighteen fifty four.
He was buried in the Lexington Cemetery, not far from
the towering monument marking the grave of his boyhood friend
Henry Clay. In nineteen eight a large monument declaring King
Solomon a hero was placed at his grave, and Kentucky
(06:53):
author James Lane Allen included the tale of King Solomon
of Kentucky in his eighteen ninety one book Flute and
Violin and Other Kentucky Tales. The rest of Aunt Charlotte's story, however,
remains unknown. And a special thanks to Kentucky journalist Sam Terry,
(07:13):
and thanks as always to John Elfner the story of
William King Solomon here on our American Stories Folks, if
you love the great American stories we tell and love
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(07:36):
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Go to our American Stories dot com now and go
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American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot com. And
(08:09):
we continue with our American stories and up next a
bit of economic history and a bit of business history.
In his Pool of Surprise winning biography The First Tycoon,
The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, author TJ. Stiles tells
the dramatic story of Cornelius Commodore Vanderbilt's humble birth during
the presidency of George Washington to his death. As one
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of the richest men in American history, the Commodore helped
to launch the transportation Revolution, propelled the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan,
and invent the modern corporation. This combative American icon, through
his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps
any other single individual to create the modern American economy.
(08:53):
Here's TJ. Styles with the story of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt
has often been depicted as this purely a moral creature
who was willing to do anything basically, and he's often
been conflated and confused with a lot of his arrivals.
For example, in the famous Eerie War of eighteen sixty eight,
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the most famous of the Gilded Age, Wall Street battles
in which he fought with Daniel Drew and Jay Gould
and Jim Fisk over the control of the Erie Railway.
There was a lot of corruption of government officials, and
I when I started writing the book, I assumed that
Vanderbilt was bribing away with the best of them. And
it turns out I could not find any evidence or
(09:38):
even any accusations at the time that Vanderbilt was bribing people,
and I thought that was kind of interesting. Because he
was ruthless. He took extraordinary steps to defeat his enemies,
and I think for much of his career, at least
until he got into the railway years, he saw his
enterprises as much as military campaigns against his enemy as
(10:00):
he did machinery and enterprise and businesses, which makes his
life a lot of fun to read about, but raises
questions about whether he did have a code and surprisingly,
he really did have a code of conduct. Now, his
opponents didn't always agree, but he really polished his reputation
as a man of his word, and I found letters
(10:22):
from people he dealt with in which they would say, well,
let's have written agreement. He said, no, you know that
my word is as good as my bond, and often
when he had disputes, he almost always suggested that they
go to arbitration. You know, each side picks an arbitrator,
and then those two arbitrators pick a third. And when
his opponents agreed, he almost always won, which tells you something.
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He would push his opponents as hard as possible, but
once he made a deal, he's stuck to it. Another
thing that's interesting about Vanderbilt, and again I'm saying this
not you know, trying to raise him up as a
great hero, now looking at him on his own terms,
what the evidence shows is that he was not only honest,
but he also believed in his duty to his stockholders.
(11:06):
And as he became a corporate official, he really believed
that he had a duty, as he put it, to
run a corporation as if it was his own personal
private property. So what he did was invest heavily in
the stock and in the nineteenth century, stock was expected
to pay dividends. They didn't look for growth in share value.
(11:26):
They looked for a steady dividends. That's what investors look
for then. So he took no salary and the only
remuneration he took was dividends in his stock. A lot
of corporate officials engaged in side dealing, and Andrew Carnegie's
mentors at the Pennsylvania Railroad are much more like the
executives we have now corporations. They were not major shareholders.
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They were professional managers hired by these largely anonymous shareholders
who run the company. Very smart men Thomas A. Scott, Jagger, Thompson.
They ran the Pennsylvania Railroad, they ran it very well,
but they also pioneered show corporations and dummy companies through
which they funneled the company's business, and they controlled those
companies and skim moneys that came in and out of
(12:09):
the Pennsylvania. Vanderbilt never engaged in that sort of business.
He thought it was abhorrent, So surprisingly for a man
who was utterly ruthless, and yet within the context of business,
he had a strict code of ethics and he lived
by it. Another thing about him is that he was
driven by pride, and I think what drove him into railroads.
When he was seventy years old, well passed life expectancy,
(12:31):
passed when he expected to live, he turned to railroads.
He didn't think I'm going to become the great railroad tycoon. No.
He started off with the New York and Harlem Railroad,
which at the time was considered the most necrotic company
in America. It was a railroad that was considered barely
worth the iron and the rails. And he said, you
know what, I can take this railroad and I can
(12:52):
make it profitable. And he said repeatedly, it was a
point of pride for me to take a company where
the stock wasn't worth ten dollars a share and to
raise it up and make it into a healthy, profitable company.
And that pride drove him. It's why he was such
a competitor personally with his racing horses, and he was
a card player, fierce competitor at everything he did. And
(13:15):
that personal pride was really something that drove him all
the way through. And that of course also made him
such a ferocious competitor with his enemies too. During much
of his life he was considered notably unbenevolent, and I
don't completely dismiss that idea. Certainly, he was no Andrew Carneggie.
He didn't engage in some of the truly great philanthropy
(13:37):
that later tycoons did. There's no doubt about that. On
the other hand, there's there's two things to remember about Vanderbilt.
One is that he hated people who were boastful and
talked about themselves, And there are a lot of reports
that are impossible to verify. They claim that he engaged
in a lot of charity, but he just refused to
put his name out there, and he would certainly I
(13:59):
do know that for example, young relatives, nephews and grandsons,
you know, their letters to presidents and whatnot, where he'd say,
you know, I normally don't do this, but I really
hope that you can help him out, and I would
like you to find a position for this guy. You know,
he engaged in helping people out much more than the
public record would indicate. I think. The other thing is
that he was a man who was deeply patriotic and
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a lot of the benevolence that he did take part in.
But he, for example, during the Civil War, donated his
largest steamship, worth almost a million dollars to the Union
Navy and personally outfitted it and then re outfitted it
for the Union. He took part in helping to prepare
major expeditions without any pay. He engaged in these activities
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because he was deeply patriotic. He named his three sons
after his heroes, George Washington, William Henry Harrison, and Canoli's Vanderbilt.
Like I said, he was a proud man. But then
after the Civil War he really took on the idea
of helping to reconcile North and South, and so he
(15:05):
put up his name as one of the bondsmen for
Jefferson Davis to get him out of prison. He specifically
wanted to help a found a university in the South,
deliberately to counterbalance his gift to the Union Navy, and
those two gifts largely balance each other. He actually gave
slightly more money to found Vanderbilt University. So it's true
he will not go down in history is one of
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the great charitable givers. But the record I think needs
to be balanced a little bit, and also specifically to
be seen as his personal vision of trying to reconcile
the two sides of the country, rather than being you know,
I'm going to found libraries that let's try to bring
the divided country together again and again. He had a
real knack. One of the secrets of his success was
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an unerring sense for where the main channel of commerce
was in the country late in life Chicago and New
York during this period the eighteen thirties and forties between
New York and Boston, and he ran his steamboat on
Long Island Sound and ran in connection with the railroads,
which there wasn't enough capital to build a railroad all
the way to New York, so they ran short lines
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down to the seaport towns on Long Island Sound. Well.
One of the interesting things is that Vanderbilt always had
a large cash reserve. When these panics hit. He always
managed to see trouble coming soon enough so that he
wasn't overexposed in terms of being overly leveraged. Another thing
is that by constantly engaging in fair wars with his opponents,
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he kept prices on his steamboats very low, and that
I think had a surprising effect. In the nineteenth century
before the Civil War, paper money was issued by private banks,
and the banks would collect a reserve of gold and silver,
which was gold or silver coin was worth its weight
in that precious metal. You could melt it down and
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sell it for the same amount, and they would issue
loans by issuing paper money. Well, most paper bank were
only issued for larger denominations a dollar or larger, usually
five dollars or larger. Vanderbilt's fairs are usually a dollar
or less. Often so he had gold and silver coin
which would never lost its value. So ironically, on a
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lot of his routes, the low fares actually ended up
giving him a large cash reserve. And you're listening to TJ.
Styles tell the story of Cornelius Vanderbilt and my goodness
to live the years he lived to get into the
railroad industry at that late in age. I had no
idea that he was that old when he started and
(17:37):
well what turned out to be one of the most
important investments of his entire life, and when he would
come to dominate when we come back more of the
story of Cornelius Vanderbilt here on our American stores. And
(18:16):
we continue with our American stories and with author TJ. Styles,
author of the book The First Tycoon, The Epic Life
of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Vanderbilt was incredibly effective at doing things like getting cheaper fuel.
He designed his steamships himself. He was one of the
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great maritime architects of the paddle wheel era, and the
steamboats he started to put on Long Island Sound were
written up in technical journals as masterpieces of naval engineering.
His first great Long Island Sound steamboat used half the
fuel of its rival steamboats, and fuel was by far
the largest expense. So these sorts of things, his ability
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to cut costs were nominal. And one thing that I
touched on the book, and I won't go into great detail,
his attacks on especially early corporations and on companies that
had monopolies, legal or otherwise, played right into a big
political conflict in the nineteenth century in which in an
economy in which there weren't large businesses, the economy's relatively
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flat lease a fair was a radical philosophy, and corporations
were seen as grants of special favors to men who
are already rich, giving them limited liability and other special privileges.
And so Vanderbilt's business enterprises during eighteen thirties and forties
were actually raised him up as a kind of Jacksonian
populist hero. Here's this guy who's an individual going after
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these rich corporations that have special privileges granted by the government,
and he made public pronouncement saying, you know, I'm the
anti monopoly guy. He called his lines the people's line.
You know, his headline said no monopoly, you know, power
to the people, or the equivalent. And in his early
career he was a radical, he was a populist. Now
he is anti is Leeds Fair philosophy stayed the same
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as he became the great railroad tycoon, and he's the
master of these giant corporations. And the political landscape rotated
one hundred and eighty degrees. So he's saying the same
things he'd said in eighteen thirties when he got into
the eighteen seventies, And meanwhile, the first government regulation advocates
are out there, and the populist all of a sudden
our favor in government intervention. So it's very interesting when
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we look at today's political landscape, and I think a
lot of liberals don't understand how people earning thirty thousand
dollars a year or the family of five can be
pro free market and anti government regulation. But when you
look at the currents of American history, a lot of
these currents are very deep, they go back very far,
and these things come up in Vanderbilt's life again and again.
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He actually was notoriously unreligious, and he was raised in
the Moravian Church. Some Vanderbilt ancestor has switched from Dutch
Reform to Moravian. And he was capable of personal charity,
and he would occasionally express things in religious terms, but
I don't know if he ever went to a church
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except for a wedding or a funeral. And this is
a period in American history when spiritualism was huge and
it was a mainstream belief. We have to remember the
Civil War killed the better part of a million Americans.
Every family had lost loved ones, and spiritualism, you having
stances contacting the dead, had gotten its start before the
(21:35):
Civil War, but in the decade after the Civil War
became a huge phenomenon. And Vanderbilt, who outlived so many contemporaries, friends,
family rivals, he started going to sciences during the Civil War,
and I don't believe that he made any business decisions
based on sciences. And one of I think a telling
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story of a witness testified to being at a stance
with him in which he asked to speak to the
ghost of Jim Fisk, one of his rivals. So the
medium contact, I don't believe in spiritualism. I don't think
they actually contacted Jim Fisk. Jim Fisk comes up, Jim
Fisk is here, and so Vanderbilt asked him a question
about a stock in the stock market, and Jim Fisk,
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of course, medium doesn't know anything. So Jim Fisk gives
a nonsense answer, and so Vanderbilt doesn't say, Oh, that's interesting.
He says, what are you talking about? Are you crazy?
And he starts to argue with a ghost, and then
Vanderbilt says, yeah, well we'll see who's right, you or me,
And then he says starts a joke with Fiske. He says, so,
how do you like it? On the other side, he said, well,
you'll find out soon enough. You're near the end of
your line. And they have this this hilarious exchange, Vanderbilt
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arguing and joking with a ghost of Jim Fisk. But
it shows that I don't think he made any decisions
based on these I think he found them comforting. I
don't think that it was his guide. But late in life,
his wife, his second wife, was very religious. She was
a Methodist, and he did give money to found Vanderbilt University,
which was specifically religious university, and he did give money
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to buy church for the Church of the Strangers, which
was a church for Southerners in New York City. But interestingly,
when he made those gifts, he didn't ask the bishop
who was the first head of Vanderbilt University, or the
minister who ran the church that he endowed. He didn't
ask them about the religious beliefs. He couldn't care less
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about theology. As he said to one of them after
he'd been preaching to Vanderbilt for a while and the
hot summer heat, waving a fan, he said, doctor, everything
you've said to me weighs about as much with me
as that fan you're waving right now. But he did
care about people, and he wanted to make sure that
those men were honest and capable. So he questioned them extensively,
but about what they were like as men. That's what
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he knew from a life in business, then from his
wife's diary, second wif's diary. When he's on his deathbed
and had a horrible several months of his body beginning
to fail, suffering terrible internal infections, he finally asked toward
the end of his very end of his life. You know,
he asked her to take part in a prayer with
him and said he wanted to give his life to Jesus.
(24:07):
And she said, well, is it because you love Jesus
or you're afraid of going to hell? It's well, you know,
to be honest both. He was amount of a few words,
but he was honest up to the very end. And
how did he see himself? There was an interesting incident
in eighteen sixty seven when he in a battle between
(24:28):
his railroads and before he took control of the New
York Central. He famously, in the depth of winter, when
boats couldn't get through the frozen harbor to Manhattan, he
to settle a dispute the New York Central Railroad. He
cut off access of all trains from the West into
New York City, essentially personally levied a blockade on the
nation's largest city. This created a bit of a furer.
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It won him his battle with the New York Central,
but it created a fuer and the New York State
legislature started to talk about laws that could pass to
control this. The way he responded when he gave testimony
is very interesting. He didn't say that you know the
law is no good, etc. He didn't talk about the
public interest. He said, if you can pass a law
(25:13):
that will compel men to pursue their interests more intelligently
than their interests themselves will compel them, then it's all
well and good. But I don't think you can do that.
In other words, he deeply believed that, basically in the
Invisible Hand, without ever having read Adam Smith, I'm sure
he didn't. He believed that the world is run by
everybody pursuing their private interests to the best of their ability.
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Now he had a business code, you thought you should
do it honestly, fiercely, but honestly. But he really believed
we things function when everybody pursues their own interests. So
that's how he saw his legacy. He didn't see himself,
as you know. He didn't think about the public interest.
He thought the public interests. He said, I've served the
public to the best of my ability. Why because it's
(25:58):
in my interest to do so, That's what he said.
So he saw himself as a man who if he
served the public, fine, but it's because I'm pursuing my
own private interests and you're listening to author TJ. Stiles,
who's written a terrific biography of Pool. It's a prize
winning biography, the first Tycoon, the epic life or Cornelius Vanderbilt,
(26:20):
and there's so much there to unpack, the idea that
he designed his own steamships, and what he was really
doing in the end, it was extracting value out of
that and through that design by making it more affordable
to ride on his steamships as opposed to his competitors.
And my goodness, what we heard there at the end, well,
what storytelling? Talking to negotiating with and arguing with a
(26:43):
former rival at a seance. I'd love to see that
scene in that movie. Is that could be really funny
and though notoriously unreligious, in the end, well, towards the
end of his life, hedged his bets. And this happens
well so often in families across the country. When we
come back the remarkable life of Cornelius Vanderbilt as told
(27:06):
by TJ. Styles, the storytelling continues here on our American story,
(27:37):
and we continue with our American stories and with the
story of Cornelius Vanderbilt as told by author TJ. Stiles.
Let's continue with his final part of this remarkable American story. Now,
with his family. You know, he had a total of
thirteen children, eleven of whom lived through adulthood, and he
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had a vast fortune when he died eighteen seventy seven.
Was estimated and it's hard to know for sure, at
one hundred million dollars. Now, I don't give equivalent modern
figures in the book because I don't think that's an
honest way to do it. But I do look at
the Controller of the Currency's report on how much money
was in circulation. And if you look at the amount
of money in circulation, if he had been able to
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sell all his assets of that estimated hundred million dollars
to American buyers, he would have taken, including cash and
demand deposits, one out of every twenty dollars in circulation. Now,
if Bill Gates, when Forbes calculated his fortune at fifty
eight billion, I think could have done the same thing.
And you take the federal reserves M two figure, which
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I will go into, he would have taken one out
of every one hundred and thirty eight dollars. So the
difference between the disparity and wealth is pretty obvious, and
that probably understates the disparity for various reasons. And plus
you've got the power that control of railroads. Get Vanderbilt.
You know, there's no industry that overshadowed the entire economy
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the way that railroads did at that time. So it
was a vast fortune. And the money he left to
his widow and to his various daughters were large amounts
at the time, at half a million dollars he left
to his wife and to some of his daughters, not all,
And that was enough for you to be very wealthy,
extremely wealthy in the nineteenth century, even the late nineteenth century.
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But he left ninety five of his estate to his
oldest son. And why well, first of all, he thought
his oldest son was capable. He'd brought William H. Vanderbilt
in as his operational manager, and he did a very
good job. But because he deliberately wanted to perpetuate his name,
the name that he had given to his steamboats into
his steamships, the name that he had given to his son,
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his second son, who unfortunately was a gambling addict and epileptic.
And so he left all this money to one son
deliberately trying to found a dinah see, and it bitterly
divided his family. Now Vanderbilt is more complicated as a
family man than again. The myth is that he was
this brutal tyrant who just abused his wife and his
(30:12):
children hated him, and that's not true. He was a
hard man. He was very judgmental. He reminds me of
a friend of mine who said that his father once
told him when when he was young, you know, I'm
never gonna let you beat me at anything. You're gonna
if we ever play a game, you're gonna have to
beat me on your own your respect. A father like that.
(30:35):
But when you're growing up, it's not a lot of
fun either, And that's the way it was her Vanderbilt.
Sometimes some famous incidents in which he was hard and
his family I think are overblown, but that doesn't make
them nice. For example, his first wife in eighteen forty six,
he put her in an insane asylum for a while. Now,
when you look at the testimony about that, it turns
(30:58):
out that you know she was having serious problems and
a son in law who generally had unfavorable feelings by
the time he spoke about this about about Vanderbilt thought,
actually it was justified. She needed medical help and an
asylum was the way to do it. So it was
a tough thing to do, but it wasn't you know,
brutal tyrant. It was sort of like, what do we do?
(31:20):
She's just not herself, she's acting weird. He again was
art on his second son, Kernel, the one who was
a gambling addict. But then again, Kernel would have tried
any father's patience. He was someone who's always in trouble
with the law, skipping out on his bills, involved in
bad debts, addicted to gambling, boastful, all the things his
father wasn't. And I sort of use him as the
(31:42):
anti hero in the book because this troubled son brings
out all of the emotional complexity in Vanderbilt. The stern judge,
the overbearing father is sometimes as harsh on his son
and had him arrested and sent to an insan asylum,
also at a time when they did not have a
language addiction, So again a hard thing to do, but
(32:02):
understandable in the context. And sometimes you know, encouraging and loving.
He's a more sympathetic character than I think we've realized,
and that's not to take away any of the complications
and ambivalence personally or historically, but you know, again, that's
that's the American experience. Questions like addiction and mental illness
are things that you know, most families deal with at
(32:25):
some point. And so William H. Vanderbilt was given credit
for doubling the family fortune in a few years. I
think that actually, if Vanderbilt himself had had done nothing
but kind of let his estate compound, and he'd lived
as long as his son, it probably would have been similar.
As he put at, the New York Central Railroad could
(32:45):
run itself after a certain point. But the interesting thing
about William H. Vanderbilt is that he was surprisingly undiplomatic
as a businessman. You know, JP Morgan bought a large
block of stock in the New York Central Railroad an
attempt to control the destructive competition among railroads, and he
complained continually about how he's always quibbling. He engages in
(33:08):
disputes that would embarrass a Bowery lawyer, and you know,
a skid Row lawyer. And he was a quarrelsome figure
who was kind of testy. And I've read a lot
of other letters complaining about how the son was testy,
but he was a nice father. So Vanderbilt, the tough
father was a diplomatic businessman. William, his son, was a
(33:29):
terrible business diplomat, but you know, kind of a nice father.
And William really as soon as his father died, and
once he settled this big fight over the will and
secured his control of the estate, he sold a controlling
block of shares to JP Morgan Syndicate and began to
build these lavish mansions, as did his children that his
(33:50):
father never would have tolerated. As soon as the old
man's dad, boom, up go the huge mansions and the
guilded age excess begins, you know, once the typefisted old
man is gone, then they started building the famous Vanderbilt mansions.
And by now the Vanderbilt fortune has been dissipated because
it was founded on the first grade industry in America.
The railroads, the first industry to mature and fade also,
(34:13):
and the New York Central Railroad, you know, was taken
over by what are now publicly owned systems, though the
infrastructure Vanderbilt built is still vital to the city of
New York. His statue is still out in front of
the modern version of Grand Central, the terminal he built,
and they still use infrastructure that he constructed you back
in the nineteenth century. It's still very much a vital
(34:35):
part of New York today, you know. I remember when
I turned in the first few chapters to my editor
and he just sent him back with another like this
is just not you can do way better than this.
It was just crushed, and I realized that I was
just writing about his business. I wasn't writing about how
it fitted into the world in which he existed and
the turning point in his early life. For example, he
(35:00):
took on his only employer he ever had in his life,
a man who was really his mentor, was a man
named Thomas Gibbons. And he's the man who hired Vanderbilt
to work on his first steamboat when he became a
steamboat captain and brought him into this great legal as
well as business battle against a monopoly, a legal monopoly
that New York State had given to the Livingston family
for steamboats and New York waters, and it led to
(35:22):
Gibbons v Ogden, the first commerce clause case that the
Supreme Court decided, and a legal landmark to the staying
which the Supreme Court said states cannot erect boundaries of trade.
We have a free market. Basically in the United States,
only Congress can control interstate trade, and it really is
one of the keys to America's economic growth. And Vanderbilt,
by the way, was keenly interested in this, went himself
(35:45):
to hear the arguments, hired Webster, Daniel Webster himself when
he was a young man with very little education. And
as I started to look into this, I realized, it's
not even about law, It's not just about business. It
is about the end of an eighteenth century culture of
deference in which you had old landed aristocratic families, especially
(36:05):
in New York, which they had mercantilist ideas. They expected
to be granted special privileges, and they sort of would
take custody of the American economy in the way in
which they had custody of politics and of other areas
of life. A New York state at the time, for example,
had not only property requirements, they had two separate levels
of property requirements. You had to have a high level
(36:27):
to vote for governor and a lower level to vote
for the state Assembly. So it was this hierarchical society,
and I realized that this era of Vanderbilt's life is
not just about him getting ahead, meeting the right guy.
It's not just about this legal battle. It was about
the end of this older hierarchical society and the birth
of an individualistic, competitive society much more like the one
(36:51):
we know today. And a great job as always by
Greg Hangler on the piece, and a special thanks to
author TJ. Styles and his book A Pulitzer Prize Winner
is the First Tycoon. The epic life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
And so often these men, these titans or caricatured when
we go to school, and their contributions to society are downplayed,
(37:15):
their villainy well up played. And in the end the
real story well so different, and we heard it straight
from a great writer who spent a lot of time
thinking about and researching this remarkable American life. Thirteen children,
eleven went to adulthood, but he left almost all the
estate to one and all because he wanted to see
(37:36):
the name and the family business continue. And by the way,
the idea that he grew up during the Washington presidency
and was born during the George Washington presidency, saw the
Civil War and got into the railroad business in his seventies,
thinking about the future and the railroads with the Internet
of their day. That's how transformative railroads were. And there
(37:59):
was Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt in his seventies when most people his
age were dead. A remarkable story about a remarkable human being,
the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Here on our American Stories
This is Leigh Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on the show,
including your story. Send them to our American Network dot org.
They're some of our favorites. And this next story comes
to us with the help of John Elfner, a high
school history teacher and a regular contributor to our show.
John is always on the hunt for a good story,
(00:30):
and recently he asked his uncle, Henry, a Kentucky horse breeder,
if he had one. Henry show John a recent newspaper
article about William King Solomon, a gravedigger who may have
saved the town of Lexington during the cholera epidemic of
eighteen thirty three. Kentucky journalist Sam Terry tells the story
(00:50):
of the man they called King Solomon. In November of
eighteen fifty four, the Reverend William M. Pratt recorded in
his diary, I preached the funeral today of old King Solomon,
seventy nine years old. He was born the same year
with Henry Clay, and had drunk whiskey enough to float
(01:10):
a man o war. He was once a person of
considerable enterprise and business, but he had been given to
drink a great many years, and yet was inoffensive and
of great integrity. Quite a number of citizens attended his funeral,
and he had a good coffin worth thirty dollars, and
some seventeen carriages processed to the cemetery. The deceased was
(01:35):
William King Solomon, a Virginian native who claimed to have
been a boyhood acquaintance of Harry, as he called Henry Clay,
jesting that his own work as a digger of sellers
and cisterns was less elevated than the famous statesman. His
loyalty to Clay was unprecedented. When one of Clay's opponents
(01:56):
for re election offered strong drink to in exchange for
his vote, Solomon took him up on the offer and
then proceeded to vote for Clay. When asked if he
had voted as agreed, Solomon replied, you may have been
foolish enough to try to bribe me, but I'm not
foolish enough to vote for you. During Solomon's lowest time
(02:20):
of life, his wife died and his son ran away,
sending him into a liquor filled existence that reduced him
to a vagabond, whom Lexingtonians nicknamed King Solomon, by eighteen
thirty three, Solomon's existence, living on the streets and intoxicated
led a local judge to sell him as a servant
(02:41):
for a period of nine months. Solomon's purchaser was the
least likely of buyers. Aunt Charlotte was a free black
woman who had apparently known Solomon in Virginia when he
was a free white male and she was an enslaved
black female, her owners having given her freedom and bequeathed
(03:03):
her some land. She supported herself by selling baked goods.
At Solomon's auction. Two Transylvania Medical College students bid on Solomon,
viewing him as being near the end of his life
and a future cadaver for their studies. Aunt Charlotte was
the winning bidder for Solomon. Her exact bid remains a mystery.
(03:27):
Some sources say she paid thirteen cents, while others claim
it was thirteen dollars, and yet another maintains it was
fifty cents. Whatever the price, King Solomon the White Vagrant
became the temporary property of Aunt Charlotte, the free woman
of color, setting in motion one of Kentucky's renowned tales
(03:49):
of the past. Aunt Charlotte freed Solomon, and true to
his addiction, he managed to acquire some liquor before wandering
back to her home, where he passed out. When Solomon awakened,
he found the town of Lexington in distress, with people
dying of cholera, one of the most feared maladies of
(04:10):
the early decades of the nineteenth century, referred to as
Asiatic cholera due to its origin in the Far East.
Cholera is contracted by ingesting the vibrio choleria microbe. The
a water that is contaminated with human feces now at
this time in eighteen thirty three, the town branch ran
(04:34):
through Lexington, and heavy rains caused its banks to overflow,
while privies overflowed into the ground, creating a deadly mixture
that poured into sinkholes, only to emerge through springs and
other sources of drinking water. There was little help for
the victims. Lexington's only hospital at the time was the
(04:57):
Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum. The town's physicians were principally faculty
members at Transylvania's Medical College. Three of the physicians died,
another was out of town and learning of the epidemic
chose not to return, and yet another rendered himself useless
after a fall. While trying to care for the sick
(05:19):
and the dying, the Lexington Observer and Reporter published the
names of more than five hundred victims in a town
with a population of six thousand. The hungover Solomon found
that Aunt Charlotte, like most Lexington residents, was packing to
evacuate the town. Historians have pondered how Solomon could have
(05:42):
managed to avoid contracting cholera, most drolly concluding that his
body was so well fortified with alcohol he was immune
to the disease. Solomon, however, refused to leave, and he
began bearing the dead. As the grave diggers had left.
With thousands of other residents. Victims of cholera were not
(06:04):
afforded the luxury of funerals or even coffins, with many
bodies being wrapped in the bed linens on which they
had died. Dozens of casualties were piled up near the
old episcopal burying ground on Third Street. Discerning the need,
Solomon began digging graves to bury hundreds of bodies and
in turn becoming the hero of Lexington. King Solomon continued
(06:30):
to live in Lexington until his death in eighteen fifty four.
He was buried in the Lexington Cemetery, not far from
the towering monument marking the grave of his boyhood friend
Henry Clay. In nineteen eight a large monument declaring King
Solomon a hero was placed at his grave, and Kentucky
(06:53):
author James Lane Allen included the tale of King Solomon
of Kentucky in his eighteen ninety one book Flute and
Violin and Other Kentucky Tales. The rest of Aunt Charlotte's story, however,
remains unknown. And a special thanks to Kentucky journalist Sam Terry,
(07:13):
and thanks as always to John Elfner the story of
William King Solomon here on our American Stories Folks, if
you love the great American stories we tell and love
America like we do, we're asking you to become a
(07:36):
part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree
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Go to our American Stories dot com now and go
to the donate button and help us keep the great
American stories coming. That's our American Stories dot com. And
(08:09):
we continue with our American stories and up next a
bit of economic history and a bit of business history.
In his Pool of Surprise winning biography The First Tycoon,
The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, author TJ. Stiles tells
the dramatic story of Cornelius Commodore Vanderbilt's humble birth during
the presidency of George Washington to his death. As one
(08:32):
of the richest men in American history, the Commodore helped
to launch the transportation Revolution, propelled the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan,
and invent the modern corporation. This combative American icon, through
his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps
any other single individual to create the modern American economy.
(08:53):
Here's TJ. Styles with the story of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt
has often been depicted as this purely a moral creature
who was willing to do anything basically, and he's often
been conflated and confused with a lot of his arrivals.
For example, in the famous Eerie War of eighteen sixty eight,
(09:17):
the most famous of the Gilded Age, Wall Street battles
in which he fought with Daniel Drew and Jay Gould
and Jim Fisk over the control of the Erie Railway.
There was a lot of corruption of government officials, and
I when I started writing the book, I assumed that
Vanderbilt was bribing away with the best of them. And
it turns out I could not find any evidence or
(09:38):
even any accusations at the time that Vanderbilt was bribing people,
and I thought that was kind of interesting. Because he
was ruthless. He took extraordinary steps to defeat his enemies,
and I think for much of his career, at least
until he got into the railway years, he saw his
enterprises as much as military campaigns against his enemy as
(10:00):
he did machinery and enterprise and businesses, which makes his
life a lot of fun to read about, but raises
questions about whether he did have a code and surprisingly,
he really did have a code of conduct. Now, his
opponents didn't always agree, but he really polished his reputation
as a man of his word, and I found letters
(10:22):
from people he dealt with in which they would say, well,
let's have written agreement. He said, no, you know that
my word is as good as my bond, and often
when he had disputes, he almost always suggested that they
go to arbitration. You know, each side picks an arbitrator,
and then those two arbitrators pick a third. And when
his opponents agreed, he almost always won, which tells you something.
(10:43):
He would push his opponents as hard as possible, but
once he made a deal, he's stuck to it. Another
thing that's interesting about Vanderbilt, and again I'm saying this
not you know, trying to raise him up as a
great hero, now looking at him on his own terms,
what the evidence shows is that he was not only honest,
but he also believed in his duty to his stockholders.
(11:06):
And as he became a corporate official, he really believed
that he had a duty, as he put it, to
run a corporation as if it was his own personal
private property. So what he did was invest heavily in
the stock and in the nineteenth century, stock was expected
to pay dividends. They didn't look for growth in share value.
(11:26):
They looked for a steady dividends. That's what investors look
for then. So he took no salary and the only
remuneration he took was dividends in his stock. A lot
of corporate officials engaged in side dealing, and Andrew Carnegie's
mentors at the Pennsylvania Railroad are much more like the
executives we have now corporations. They were not major shareholders.
(11:47):
They were professional managers hired by these largely anonymous shareholders
who run the company. Very smart men Thomas A. Scott, Jagger, Thompson.
They ran the Pennsylvania Railroad, they ran it very well,
but they also pioneered show corporations and dummy companies through
which they funneled the company's business, and they controlled those
companies and skim moneys that came in and out of
(12:09):
the Pennsylvania. Vanderbilt never engaged in that sort of business.
He thought it was abhorrent, So surprisingly for a man
who was utterly ruthless, and yet within the context of business,
he had a strict code of ethics and he lived
by it. Another thing about him is that he was
driven by pride, and I think what drove him into railroads.
When he was seventy years old, well passed life expectancy,
(12:31):
passed when he expected to live, he turned to railroads.
He didn't think I'm going to become the great railroad tycoon. No.
He started off with the New York and Harlem Railroad,
which at the time was considered the most necrotic company
in America. It was a railroad that was considered barely
worth the iron and the rails. And he said, you
know what, I can take this railroad and I can
(12:52):
make it profitable. And he said repeatedly, it was a
point of pride for me to take a company where
the stock wasn't worth ten dollars a share and to
raise it up and make it into a healthy, profitable company.
And that pride drove him. It's why he was such
a competitor personally with his racing horses, and he was
a card player, fierce competitor at everything he did. And
(13:15):
that personal pride was really something that drove him all
the way through. And that of course also made him
such a ferocious competitor with his enemies too. During much
of his life he was considered notably unbenevolent, and I
don't completely dismiss that idea. Certainly, he was no Andrew Carneggie.
He didn't engage in some of the truly great philanthropy
(13:37):
that later tycoons did. There's no doubt about that. On
the other hand, there's there's two things to remember about Vanderbilt.
One is that he hated people who were boastful and
talked about themselves, And there are a lot of reports
that are impossible to verify. They claim that he engaged
in a lot of charity, but he just refused to
put his name out there, and he would certainly I
(13:59):
do know that for example, young relatives, nephews and grandsons,
you know, their letters to presidents and whatnot, where he'd say,
you know, I normally don't do this, but I really
hope that you can help him out, and I would
like you to find a position for this guy. You know,
he engaged in helping people out much more than the
public record would indicate. I think. The other thing is
that he was a man who was deeply patriotic and
(14:23):
a lot of the benevolence that he did take part in.
But he, for example, during the Civil War, donated his
largest steamship, worth almost a million dollars to the Union
Navy and personally outfitted it and then re outfitted it
for the Union. He took part in helping to prepare
major expeditions without any pay. He engaged in these activities
(14:45):
because he was deeply patriotic. He named his three sons
after his heroes, George Washington, William Henry Harrison, and Canoli's Vanderbilt.
Like I said, he was a proud man. But then
after the Civil War he really took on the idea
of helping to reconcile North and South, and so he
(15:05):
put up his name as one of the bondsmen for
Jefferson Davis to get him out of prison. He specifically
wanted to help a found a university in the South,
deliberately to counterbalance his gift to the Union Navy, and
those two gifts largely balance each other. He actually gave
slightly more money to found Vanderbilt University. So it's true
he will not go down in history is one of
(15:26):
the great charitable givers. But the record I think needs
to be balanced a little bit, and also specifically to
be seen as his personal vision of trying to reconcile
the two sides of the country, rather than being you know,
I'm going to found libraries that let's try to bring
the divided country together again and again. He had a
real knack. One of the secrets of his success was
(15:47):
an unerring sense for where the main channel of commerce
was in the country late in life Chicago and New
York during this period the eighteen thirties and forties between
New York and Boston, and he ran his steamboat on
Long Island Sound and ran in connection with the railroads,
which there wasn't enough capital to build a railroad all
the way to New York, so they ran short lines
(16:08):
down to the seaport towns on Long Island Sound. Well.
One of the interesting things is that Vanderbilt always had
a large cash reserve. When these panics hit. He always
managed to see trouble coming soon enough so that he
wasn't overexposed in terms of being overly leveraged. Another thing
is that by constantly engaging in fair wars with his opponents,
(16:33):
he kept prices on his steamboats very low, and that
I think had a surprising effect. In the nineteenth century
before the Civil War, paper money was issued by private banks,
and the banks would collect a reserve of gold and silver,
which was gold or silver coin was worth its weight
in that precious metal. You could melt it down and
(16:53):
sell it for the same amount, and they would issue
loans by issuing paper money. Well, most paper bank were
only issued for larger denominations a dollar or larger, usually
five dollars or larger. Vanderbilt's fairs are usually a dollar
or less. Often so he had gold and silver coin
which would never lost its value. So ironically, on a
(17:16):
lot of his routes, the low fares actually ended up
giving him a large cash reserve. And you're listening to TJ.
Styles tell the story of Cornelius Vanderbilt and my goodness
to live the years he lived to get into the
railroad industry at that late in age. I had no
idea that he was that old when he started and
(17:37):
well what turned out to be one of the most
important investments of his entire life, and when he would
come to dominate when we come back more of the
story of Cornelius Vanderbilt here on our American stores. And
(18:16):
we continue with our American stories and with author TJ. Styles,
author of the book The First Tycoon, The Epic Life
of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Let's pick up where we last left off.
Vanderbilt was incredibly effective at doing things like getting cheaper fuel.
He designed his steamships himself. He was one of the
(18:38):
great maritime architects of the paddle wheel era, and the
steamboats he started to put on Long Island Sound were
written up in technical journals as masterpieces of naval engineering.
His first great Long Island Sound steamboat used half the
fuel of its rival steamboats, and fuel was by far
the largest expense. So these sorts of things, his ability
(18:58):
to cut costs were nominal. And one thing that I
touched on the book, and I won't go into great detail,
his attacks on especially early corporations and on companies that
had monopolies, legal or otherwise, played right into a big
political conflict in the nineteenth century in which in an
economy in which there weren't large businesses, the economy's relatively
(19:20):
flat lease a fair was a radical philosophy, and corporations
were seen as grants of special favors to men who
are already rich, giving them limited liability and other special privileges.
And so Vanderbilt's business enterprises during eighteen thirties and forties
were actually raised him up as a kind of Jacksonian
populist hero. Here's this guy who's an individual going after
(19:44):
these rich corporations that have special privileges granted by the government,
and he made public pronouncement saying, you know, I'm the
anti monopoly guy. He called his lines the people's line.
You know, his headline said no monopoly, you know, power
to the people, or the equivalent. And in his early
career he was a radical, he was a populist. Now
he is anti is Leeds Fair philosophy stayed the same
(20:08):
as he became the great railroad tycoon, and he's the
master of these giant corporations. And the political landscape rotated
one hundred and eighty degrees. So he's saying the same
things he'd said in eighteen thirties when he got into
the eighteen seventies, And meanwhile, the first government regulation advocates
are out there, and the populist all of a sudden
our favor in government intervention. So it's very interesting when
(20:29):
we look at today's political landscape, and I think a
lot of liberals don't understand how people earning thirty thousand
dollars a year or the family of five can be
pro free market and anti government regulation. But when you
look at the currents of American history, a lot of
these currents are very deep, they go back very far,
and these things come up in Vanderbilt's life again and again.
(20:51):
He actually was notoriously unreligious, and he was raised in
the Moravian Church. Some Vanderbilt ancestor has switched from Dutch
Reform to Moravian. And he was capable of personal charity,
and he would occasionally express things in religious terms, but
I don't know if he ever went to a church
(21:13):
except for a wedding or a funeral. And this is
a period in American history when spiritualism was huge and
it was a mainstream belief. We have to remember the
Civil War killed the better part of a million Americans.
Every family had lost loved ones, and spiritualism, you having
stances contacting the dead, had gotten its start before the
(21:35):
Civil War, but in the decade after the Civil War
became a huge phenomenon. And Vanderbilt, who outlived so many contemporaries, friends,
family rivals, he started going to sciences during the Civil War,
and I don't believe that he made any business decisions
based on sciences. And one of I think a telling
(21:56):
story of a witness testified to being at a stance
with him in which he asked to speak to the
ghost of Jim Fisk, one of his rivals. So the
medium contact, I don't believe in spiritualism. I don't think
they actually contacted Jim Fisk. Jim Fisk comes up, Jim
Fisk is here, and so Vanderbilt asked him a question
about a stock in the stock market, and Jim Fisk,
(22:17):
of course, medium doesn't know anything. So Jim Fisk gives
a nonsense answer, and so Vanderbilt doesn't say, Oh, that's interesting.
He says, what are you talking about? Are you crazy?
And he starts to argue with a ghost, and then
Vanderbilt says, yeah, well we'll see who's right, you or me,
And then he says starts a joke with Fiske. He says, so,
how do you like it? On the other side, he said, well,
you'll find out soon enough. You're near the end of
your line. And they have this this hilarious exchange, Vanderbilt
(22:40):
arguing and joking with a ghost of Jim Fisk. But
it shows that I don't think he made any decisions
based on these I think he found them comforting. I
don't think that it was his guide. But late in life,
his wife, his second wife, was very religious. She was
a Methodist, and he did give money to found Vanderbilt University,
which was specifically religious university, and he did give money
(23:04):
to buy church for the Church of the Strangers, which
was a church for Southerners in New York City. But interestingly,
when he made those gifts, he didn't ask the bishop
who was the first head of Vanderbilt University, or the
minister who ran the church that he endowed. He didn't
ask them about the religious beliefs. He couldn't care less
(23:25):
about theology. As he said to one of them after
he'd been preaching to Vanderbilt for a while and the
hot summer heat, waving a fan, he said, doctor, everything
you've said to me weighs about as much with me
as that fan you're waving right now. But he did
care about people, and he wanted to make sure that
those men were honest and capable. So he questioned them extensively,
but about what they were like as men. That's what
(23:46):
he knew from a life in business, then from his
wife's diary, second wif's diary. When he's on his deathbed
and had a horrible several months of his body beginning
to fail, suffering terrible internal infections, he finally asked toward
the end of his very end of his life. You know,
he asked her to take part in a prayer with
him and said he wanted to give his life to Jesus.
(24:07):
And she said, well, is it because you love Jesus
or you're afraid of going to hell? It's well, you know,
to be honest both. He was amount of a few words,
but he was honest up to the very end. And
how did he see himself? There was an interesting incident
in eighteen sixty seven when he in a battle between
(24:28):
his railroads and before he took control of the New
York Central. He famously, in the depth of winter, when
boats couldn't get through the frozen harbor to Manhattan, he
to settle a dispute the New York Central Railroad. He
cut off access of all trains from the West into
New York City, essentially personally levied a blockade on the
nation's largest city. This created a bit of a furer.
(24:50):
It won him his battle with the New York Central,
but it created a fuer and the New York State
legislature started to talk about laws that could pass to
control this. The way he responded when he gave testimony
is very interesting. He didn't say that you know the
law is no good, etc. He didn't talk about the
public interest. He said, if you can pass a law
(25:13):
that will compel men to pursue their interests more intelligently
than their interests themselves will compel them, then it's all
well and good. But I don't think you can do that.
In other words, he deeply believed that, basically in the
Invisible Hand, without ever having read Adam Smith, I'm sure
he didn't. He believed that the world is run by
everybody pursuing their private interests to the best of their ability.
(25:36):
Now he had a business code, you thought you should
do it honestly, fiercely, but honestly. But he really believed
we things function when everybody pursues their own interests. So
that's how he saw his legacy. He didn't see himself,
as you know. He didn't think about the public interest.
He thought the public interests. He said, I've served the
public to the best of my ability. Why because it's
(25:58):
in my interest to do so, That's what he said.
So he saw himself as a man who if he
served the public, fine, but it's because I'm pursuing my
own private interests and you're listening to author TJ. Stiles,
who's written a terrific biography of Pool. It's a prize
winning biography, the first Tycoon, the epic life or Cornelius Vanderbilt,
(26:20):
and there's so much there to unpack, the idea that
he designed his own steamships, and what he was really
doing in the end, it was extracting value out of
that and through that design by making it more affordable
to ride on his steamships as opposed to his competitors.
And my goodness, what we heard there at the end, well,
what storytelling? Talking to negotiating with and arguing with a
(26:43):
former rival at a seance. I'd love to see that
scene in that movie. Is that could be really funny
and though notoriously unreligious, in the end, well, towards the
end of his life, hedged his bets. And this happens
well so often in families across the country. When we
come back the remarkable life of Cornelius Vanderbilt as told
(27:06):
by TJ. Styles, the storytelling continues here on our American story,
(27:37):
and we continue with our American stories and with the
story of Cornelius Vanderbilt as told by author TJ. Stiles.
Let's continue with his final part of this remarkable American story. Now,
with his family. You know, he had a total of
thirteen children, eleven of whom lived through adulthood, and he
(28:01):
had a vast fortune when he died eighteen seventy seven.
Was estimated and it's hard to know for sure, at
one hundred million dollars. Now, I don't give equivalent modern
figures in the book because I don't think that's an
honest way to do it. But I do look at
the Controller of the Currency's report on how much money
was in circulation. And if you look at the amount
of money in circulation, if he had been able to
(28:22):
sell all his assets of that estimated hundred million dollars
to American buyers, he would have taken, including cash and
demand deposits, one out of every twenty dollars in circulation. Now,
if Bill Gates, when Forbes calculated his fortune at fifty
eight billion, I think could have done the same thing.
And you take the federal reserves M two figure, which
(28:43):
I will go into, he would have taken one out
of every one hundred and thirty eight dollars. So the
difference between the disparity and wealth is pretty obvious, and
that probably understates the disparity for various reasons. And plus
you've got the power that control of railroads. Get Vanderbilt.
You know, there's no industry that overshadowed the entire economy
(29:04):
the way that railroads did at that time. So it
was a vast fortune. And the money he left to
his widow and to his various daughters were large amounts
at the time, at half a million dollars he left
to his wife and to some of his daughters, not all,
And that was enough for you to be very wealthy,
extremely wealthy in the nineteenth century, even the late nineteenth century.
(29:25):
But he left ninety five of his estate to his
oldest son. And why well, first of all, he thought
his oldest son was capable. He'd brought William H. Vanderbilt
in as his operational manager, and he did a very
good job. But because he deliberately wanted to perpetuate his name,
the name that he had given to his steamboats into
his steamships, the name that he had given to his son,
(29:49):
his second son, who unfortunately was a gambling addict and epileptic.
And so he left all this money to one son
deliberately trying to found a dinah see, and it bitterly
divided his family. Now Vanderbilt is more complicated as a
family man than again. The myth is that he was
this brutal tyrant who just abused his wife and his
(30:12):
children hated him, and that's not true. He was a
hard man. He was very judgmental. He reminds me of
a friend of mine who said that his father once
told him when when he was young, you know, I'm
never gonna let you beat me at anything. You're gonna
if we ever play a game, you're gonna have to
beat me on your own your respect. A father like that.
(30:35):
But when you're growing up, it's not a lot of
fun either, And that's the way it was her Vanderbilt.
Sometimes some famous incidents in which he was hard and
his family I think are overblown, but that doesn't make
them nice. For example, his first wife in eighteen forty six,
he put her in an insane asylum for a while. Now,
when you look at the testimony about that, it turns
(30:58):
out that you know she was having serious problems and
a son in law who generally had unfavorable feelings by
the time he spoke about this about about Vanderbilt thought,
actually it was justified. She needed medical help and an
asylum was the way to do it. So it was
a tough thing to do, but it wasn't you know,
brutal tyrant. It was sort of like, what do we do?
(31:20):
She's just not herself, she's acting weird. He again was
art on his second son, Kernel, the one who was
a gambling addict. But then again, Kernel would have tried
any father's patience. He was someone who's always in trouble
with the law, skipping out on his bills, involved in
bad debts, addicted to gambling, boastful, all the things his
father wasn't. And I sort of use him as the
(31:42):
anti hero in the book because this troubled son brings
out all of the emotional complexity in Vanderbilt. The stern judge,
the overbearing father is sometimes as harsh on his son
and had him arrested and sent to an insan asylum,
also at a time when they did not have a
language addiction, So again a hard thing to do, but
(32:02):
understandable in the context. And sometimes you know, encouraging and loving.
He's a more sympathetic character than I think we've realized,
and that's not to take away any of the complications
and ambivalence personally or historically, but you know, again, that's
that's the American experience. Questions like addiction and mental illness
are things that you know, most families deal with at
(32:25):
some point. And so William H. Vanderbilt was given credit
for doubling the family fortune in a few years. I
think that actually, if Vanderbilt himself had had done nothing
but kind of let his estate compound, and he'd lived
as long as his son, it probably would have been similar.
As he put at, the New York Central Railroad could
(32:45):
run itself after a certain point. But the interesting thing
about William H. Vanderbilt is that he was surprisingly undiplomatic
as a businessman. You know, JP Morgan bought a large
block of stock in the New York Central Railroad an
attempt to control the destructive competition among railroads, and he
complained continually about how he's always quibbling. He engages in
(33:08):
disputes that would embarrass a Bowery lawyer, and you know,
a skid Row lawyer. And he was a quarrelsome figure
who was kind of testy. And I've read a lot
of other letters complaining about how the son was testy,
but he was a nice father. So Vanderbilt, the tough
father was a diplomatic businessman. William, his son, was a
(33:29):
terrible business diplomat, but you know, kind of a nice father.
And William really as soon as his father died, and
once he settled this big fight over the will and
secured his control of the estate, he sold a controlling
block of shares to JP Morgan Syndicate and began to
build these lavish mansions, as did his children that his
(33:50):
father never would have tolerated. As soon as the old
man's dad, boom, up go the huge mansions and the
guilded age excess begins, you know, once the typefisted old
man is gone, then they started building the famous Vanderbilt mansions.
And by now the Vanderbilt fortune has been dissipated because
it was founded on the first grade industry in America.
The railroads, the first industry to mature and fade also,
(34:13):
and the New York Central Railroad, you know, was taken
over by what are now publicly owned systems, though the
infrastructure Vanderbilt built is still vital to the city of
New York. His statue is still out in front of
the modern version of Grand Central, the terminal he built,
and they still use infrastructure that he constructed you back
in the nineteenth century. It's still very much a vital
(34:35):
part of New York today, you know. I remember when
I turned in the first few chapters to my editor
and he just sent him back with another like this
is just not you can do way better than this.
It was just crushed, and I realized that I was
just writing about his business. I wasn't writing about how
it fitted into the world in which he existed and
the turning point in his early life. For example, he
(35:00):
took on his only employer he ever had in his life,
a man who was really his mentor, was a man
named Thomas Gibbons. And he's the man who hired Vanderbilt
to work on his first steamboat when he became a
steamboat captain and brought him into this great legal as
well as business battle against a monopoly, a legal monopoly
that New York State had given to the Livingston family
for steamboats and New York waters, and it led to
(35:22):
Gibbons v Ogden, the first commerce clause case that the
Supreme Court decided, and a legal landmark to the staying
which the Supreme Court said states cannot erect boundaries of trade.
We have a free market. Basically in the United States,
only Congress can control interstate trade, and it really is
one of the keys to America's economic growth. And Vanderbilt,
by the way, was keenly interested in this, went himself
(35:45):
to hear the arguments, hired Webster, Daniel Webster himself when
he was a young man with very little education. And
as I started to look into this, I realized, it's
not even about law, It's not just about business. It
is about the end of an eighteenth century culture of
deference in which you had old landed aristocratic families, especially
(36:05):
in New York, which they had mercantilist ideas. They expected
to be granted special privileges, and they sort of would
take custody of the American economy in the way in
which they had custody of politics and of other areas
of life. A New York state at the time, for example,
had not only property requirements, they had two separate levels
of property requirements. You had to have a high level
(36:27):
to vote for governor and a lower level to vote
for the state Assembly. So it was this hierarchical society,
and I realized that this era of Vanderbilt's life is
not just about him getting ahead, meeting the right guy.
It's not just about this legal battle. It was about
the end of this older hierarchical society and the birth
of an individualistic, competitive society much more like the one
(36:51):
we know today. And a great job as always by
Greg Hangler on the piece, and a special thanks to
author TJ. Styles and his book A Pulitzer Prize Winner
is the First Tycoon. The epic life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.
And so often these men, these titans or caricatured when
we go to school, and their contributions to society are downplayed,
(37:15):
their villainy well up played. And in the end the
real story well so different, and we heard it straight
from a great writer who spent a lot of time
thinking about and researching this remarkable American life. Thirteen children,
eleven went to adulthood, but he left almost all the
estate to one and all because he wanted to see
(37:36):
the name and the family business continue. And by the way,
the idea that he grew up during the Washington presidency
and was born during the George Washington presidency, saw the
Civil War and got into the railroad business in his seventies,
thinking about the future and the railroads with the Internet
of their day. That's how transformative railroads were. And there
(37:59):
was Vanderbilt. Vanderbilt in his seventies when most people his
age were dead. A remarkable story about a remarkable human being,
the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Here on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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