We must try to understand Theodore Vail, for his basic character type recurs in other “Defining Moguls,” the men who drive the Cycle and populate this book. Schumpeter theorized that men like Vail were rare, a special breed, with unusual talents and ambitions. Their motivation was not money, but rather “the dream and the will to found a private kingdom”; “the will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others”; and finally the “joy of creating.” Vail was that type. As his biographer put it, “he always had a taste for conquest … here was a new world to subjugate.”18
