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Updated: May 19, 2025
Since that time the population and resources of the United States have vastly increased; wealth in the hold of a few has become more intensely centralized; great fortunes have gone far beyond their already extraordinary boundaries of twenty years ago; the possessions of the Vanderbilts have expanded and swollen in value everywhere, although recently the Standard Oil oligarchy has been encroaching upon their possessions.
But I should just like to take him round in this little old metropolis awhile, and show him 'Every Other Week' on the centre tables of the millionaires the Vanderbilts and the Astors and in the homes of culture and refinement everywhere, and let him judge for himself.
A diminutive and wrinkled dame in costly furs frowned through her golden spectacles at her book, while her maid sat attentively by. An American actress was the centre of an eager group of grinning young men; she was unseen, but her voice was distinct. The two Vanderbilts took their brisk constitutional among us as though the liner had but two real passengers though many invisible nobodies.
And even in America, the land of the millionaire and multi-millionaire, the names that are graven on the nation's heart, and which men delight to honour, are not its Vanderbilts, or its Jay Goulds, but Lincoln, and Grant, and Garfield, and Webster, and Clay. This is not mere "curb-stone rhetoric"; I speak the words of soberness and truth.
Money vanishes, official dignity is forgotten, caste lines are as full of gaps as an ill-kept hedge. The grandfather of the Vanderbilts was a bounder; the last of the Washingtons is a petty employé in the Library of Congress.
This devious arrangement was intended to conceal the real ownership, and to have a plausible claim in counteracting the charge that many railroads were concentrated in one ownership, and were combined in monopoly in restraint of trade. The plan ran thus: The Vanderbilts owned the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad.
The Vanderbilts' ownership of a large part of the shares of railroads, which, in turn, own and control the coal mines, may be summed up as follows: Through the Lake Shore Railroad, which they have owned almost absolutely, they own, or until recently did own, $30,000,000 of shares in the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad with its stupendous anthracite coal deposits, and they owned, for a long time, large amounts of stock in the Lehigh Valley Railroad with its unmined coal deposits of 400,000,000 tons.
In the early seventies the Pennsylvania system was organized and the Vanderbilts acquired control of lines as far west as Chicago. Soon the Baltimore and Ohio system extended its empire of trade to the Mississippi. Half a dozen ambitious trans-Mississippi systems, connecting with four new transcontinental projects, were put into operation. Prosperity is always the opportunity of the politician.
And ye have the Sportsmen's Show, where the girl that measures 36, 19, 45 cooks breakfast food in a birch-bark wigwam on the banks of the Grand Canal of Venice conducted by one of the Vanderbilts, Bernard McFadden, and the Reverends Dowie and Duss. And ye have the French ball, where the original Cohens and the Robert Emmet-Sangerbund Society dance the Highland fling one with another.
The Goulds, Stanfords, Vanderbilts, Floods, Carnegies and Schwabs had all been lifted from the level of the masses to financial grandeur before the eyes of the multitude, and democratic ambitions drove parents who thought themselves in the line of financial advancement to secure culture for their girls in time.
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