(TJ Stiles is a great writer. I reviewed his bio of Jesse James here:
http://www.swans.com/library/art14/lproy47.html)
NY Times, April 29, 2009
Books of The Times
The Mogul Who Built Corporate America
By DWIGHT GARNER
THE FIRST TYCOON
The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
By T. J. Stiles
Illustrated. 719 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $37.50.
Cornelius Vanderbilt, the great steamship and then railroad magnate, the
man who built the original Grand Central Terminal, was not much of a
conversationalist. If a man boasted in his presence, he would say, “That
amounts to nothing.” If interrupted while speaking, he would stop
talking and not resume the subject. Vanderbilt (1794-1877) didn’t need
words. His actions spoke with a brute eloquence.
In this whacking new biography of Vanderbilt, T. J. Stiles, previously
the author of a life of Jesse James, demonstrates a brute eloquence of
his own. This is a mighty — and mighty confident — work, one that moves
with force and conviction and imperious wit through Vanderbilt’s noisy
life and times. The book, “The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius
Vanderbilt,” is full of sharp, unexpected turns. Among the biggest: Mr.
Stiles has delivered a revisionist history of American capitalism’s
original sinner, the man who inspired the term “robber baron.” He has
real sympathy for the old devil.
The phrase “epic life” is a biographical cliché. But it fits Vanderbilt
in every regard: force of personality; degrees of ruthlessness, guile
and accomplishment; even sheer life span. He was born less than two
decades after the end of the Revolutionary War, while Washington was
still alive, and he would live long enough not only to play a
significant role in the Civil War but also to do business with John D.
Rockefeller.
Vanderbilt essentially invented the modern corporation through his
purchase and consolidation of New York’s major railroads, and brought,
Mr. Stiles says, the American professional and managerial middle class
into being. His influence remains so great as to be almost intangible.
As Mr. Stiles writes: “He may have left his most lasting mark in the
invisible world, by creating an unseen architecture which later
generations of Americans would take for granted.”
How you feel about the “unseen architecture” of American economics and
corporate life says a lot about, or even defines, your politics. Mr.
Stiles sees both sides of Vanderbilt:
“His admirers saw him as the ultimate meritocrat, the finest example of
the common man rising through hard work and ability. ... His critics
called him grasping and ruthless, an unelected king who never pretended
to rule for his people.” But Mr. Stiles plainly gets a charge out of
Vanderbilt’s raw nerve.
Cornelius Vanderbilt grew up on Staten Island, the son of a modest
farming family. He attended school for only a few months, developing
what Mr. Stiles calls “a lasting contempt for the conventions of written
English.” He was born in the right place at the right time.
“Unlike most country folk,” Mr. Stiles writes, “the Vanderbilts lived
within sight of the place of the most densely concentrated possibilities
in North America: the city of New York.”
As a young man, Vanderbilt began working on ferries and schooners and
then, with their increasing popularity in the 1820s and ’30s,
steamboats. He made a name for himself in business for his “elbows-out
aggressiveness.”
He made a name for himself, too, with his imposing appearance. A
contemporary described him as “a man of striking individuality, as
straight as an Indian, standing six feet in his stockings and weighing
about 200 pounds.” Frugal and abstemious, Vanderbilt had one vice: the
constant presence of a lighted or unlighted cigar.
The most flat-out enjoyable sections of “The First Tycoon” are those
that deal with New York’s great steamship wars of the first half of the
19th century. Vanderbilt began to build and operate his own fleet,
picking up the nickname the Commodore in the process. He engaged in
price wars, cutting fares until competitors went out of business or paid
him to go away. He slowly developed a chokehold on commerce.
By the late 1840s, Mr. Stiles writes, “almost everyone who traveled
between New York and Boston took a Vanderbilt boat or a Vanderbilt train.”
Vanderbilt loved to compete, and to smite his enemies. Mr. Stiles tells
of epic steamboat races, much reported in New York’s newspapers, that
Vanderbilt took part in and gambled on. His boats ran against other
ships up the Hudson nearly as far as West Point, then turned around and
roared home. Vanderbilt helped fuel the gold rush, getting his
steamships around to San Francisco. He tried to cut a more direct path
to the West Coast, a canal through Nicaragua, and there are scenes of
stranded steamers here that are straight out of the movie
“Fitzcarraldo.” He provided steamships to the Union during the Civil
War, including one, fitted out with a special ram, that stared down the
Confederate ironclad warship, the Merrimac, keeping it in check for much
of the war.
The book’s final sections unpack Vanderbilt’s greatest coup, buying and
then consolidating New York’s major railroad lines, using every trick in
his arsenal, including the manipulation of stock prices. His wealth
became enormous.
“If he had been able to sell all his assets at full market value at the
moment of his death,” Mr. Stiles writes, “he would have taken one out of
every 20 dollars in circulation.”
Mr. Stiles is clear-eyed about his subject’s nearly amoral rapacity. He
writes that Vanderbilt “exacerbated problems that would never be fully
solved: a huge disparity in wealth between rich and poor; the
concentration of great power in private hands; the fraud and
self-serving deception that thrives in an unregulated environment.”
But again and again in “The First Tycoon,” he also defends Vanderbilt
against his most vocal detractors and, whenever possible, corrects the
historical record when it has portrayed him unfairly. Vanderbilt did not
actually say, to give just one example, a line that was used against him
at the time: “Law! What do I care about the law?”
Mr. Stiles gets Vanderbilt the man onto paper. He is eloquent on
Vanderbilt’s love of horses and horse racing, his tangled relationships
with his 13 children and his dabbling in the occult. (About the séances
Vanderbilt attended, Mr. Stiles writes: “The possibility of mastering
even death itself must have been appealing.”)
He is even better on Vanderbilt’s fraught relationship with New York
society, which at first shunned him as “illiterate and boorish.”
There are moments in any biography of this size when your eyes are going
to glaze over; I certainly did not wish “The First Tycoon” were longer.
But I read eagerly and avidly. This is state-of-the-art biography,
crisper and more piquant than a 600-page book has any right to be.
Cornelius Vanderbilt emerges clearly in these pages as a man who, as his
son-in-law put it, “was determined to have his own way, always, to a
greater extent than any man I ever saw.”
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