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Updated: May 19, 2025
They had already reduced wages to the point of the merest subsistence; and now they decreed that wages must again be curtailed ten cents on every dollar. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, then in the hands of the Garrett family, with a career behind it of consecutive political corruption and fraud, in some ways surpassing that of the Vanderbilts, led in reducing the wages of its workers.
The people of the city of New York were forced to bear a compulsory taxation of $1,200,000 without getting the slightest equivalent for it. The Vanderbilts own these elevated approaches absolutely; not a cent's worth of claim or title have the people in them. At this point a significant note may be made in passing.
Concomitantly, while executing the transactions already described, the Vanderbilts of the third generation put through many others, both large and small, which were converted into further heaps of wealth. An enumeration of all of these diverse frauds would necessitate a tiresome presentation. A few examples will suffice. The small frauds were but lesser in relation to the larger.
I have eaten with Indian women whose lineage reaches back to names that were mighty before the first Astors and the first Vanderbilts were born. The descendant of a king has hunted me caribou meat at two cents a pound.
The frauds and extortions of the Pullman Company have been sufficiently dealt with in the particular chapter on Marshall Field. In the far-away Philippine Islands the Vanderbilts are engaged, with other magnates, in the exploitation of both the United States Government and the native population. The Visayan Railroad numbers one of the Vanderbilts among its directors.
Marriages with titled foreigners have proved a drain upon the Vanderbilt fortune, although, thanks to their large share in the control of laws and industrial institutions, the Vanderbilts possess at all times the power of recouping themselves at volition. The American marriages, on the other hand, contracted by this family, have interlinked other great fortunes with theirs.
Has it not favoured the monopoly which has anointed the Vanderbilts and the Polyakoffs, the directors of the P.L.M., the C.P.R., the St. Gothard, "the kings of our days"? Therefore, if we give as an example the tacit agreement come to between railway companies, it is by no means as an ideal of economical management, nor even an ideal of technical organization.
That fulsome writer, with the usual inaccuracies and turgid exaggerations of "popular writers," omitted to say that although Field was long the controlling figure in the management of the Pullman works, yet other powerful American multimillionaires, such as the Vanderbilts, had also become large stockholders.
Fannie Davenport was just opening at the Fifth Avenue. Daly was producing "King Lear." He read of the early departure for the season of a party composed of the Vanderbilts and their friends for Florida. An interesting shooting affray was on in the mountains of Kentucky. So he read, read, read, rocking in the warm room near the radiator and waiting for dinner to be served.
The Bradley-Martins are henceforth entitled to wear their ears interlaced with laurel leaves as a sign of superiority in their "set." They won the burro pennant honestly, if not easily, daylight being plainly visible between their foam-crested crupper and the panting nostrils of the Vanderbilts. They are now monarch of Rag-fair, chief gyasticuti of the boundless realm of Nescience and Noodledom.
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