WITH ALL HIS ENEMIES CHASTISED, Vanderbilt had to decide what to do next. No matter how significant he was as a financier, temperamentally he wasn’t suited to merely play the money man. He was a builder of enterprises—more specifically, he was a competitor. He was accustomed to taking a leading role in transportation, which was by far the largest sector in the American economy; that meant he was accustomed to being a public figure, for transportation was the great meeting ground of public and private interests in the nineteenth-century republic. It is not surprising, then, that as soon as he
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