The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Pulitzer Prize Winner)

by T.J. Stiles

In his formative years, competition had been the stuff of individualism, the egalitarian battle cry. The Jacksonians had seen strong government as the bodyguard of the “aristocrats,” as the creator of “special privileges” for the wealthy, best seen in state-chartered corporations. But two great developments had made antebellum politics obsolete: the rise of the railroads, and the Civil War. The railroads posed a double, if not triple, conundrum. They could exist only as corporations, since they were too capital intensive, too long-lived, to be personal proprietorships or partnerships. As a result, they made the corporation a fact of life in America, which rendered the Jack-sonian critique of special privileges almost irrelevant. But they remained hotly controversial, thanks to their sheer enormity (on a scale forged by Vanderbilt himself). No other force in society rivaled them. Charles F. Adams Jr. observed in 1869, “It is but a very few years since the existence of a corporation controlling a few millions of dollars was regarded as a subject of grave apprehension, and now this country already contains single organizations which wield a power represented by hundreds of millions.” Railroads virtually monopolized transportation,

Monopolized will be the key word when the Fed government addresses this power with Standard Oil