6.7 Labor in the Gilded Age

Question: How is the freight and passenger pool working?

Vanderbilt: Very satisfactorily. I don’t like that expression, “pool,” however, that’s a common construction applied by the people to a combination which the leading roads have entered into to keep rates at a point where they will pay dividends to the stockholders. The railroads are not run for the benefit of the “dear public”—that cry is all nonsense—they are built by men who invest their money and expect to get a fair percentage on the same…

Question: But don’t you run it for the public benefit? 

Vanderbilt: The public be damned. What does the public care for the railroads except to get as much out of them for as small consideration as possible? I don’t take any stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody’s good but our own.

“We have had an era of material inventions. We now need a renaissance of moral inventions… Monopoly and anti-monopoly...represent the two great tendencies of our time: monopoly, the tendency to combination; anti-monopoly, the demand for social control of it. As the man is bent toward business or patriotism, he will negotiate combination or agitate for laws to regulate them. The first is capitalistic and the second is social. The first, industrial; the second, moral. The first promotes wealth; the second citizenship. Our young men can no longer go west; they must go up or down. Not new land, but new virtue must be the outlet for the future.”

“I could not agree to submit to arbitration. Take the case in hand: the questions as to whether the shops at Pullman shall be continuously operated at a loss or not is one which it was impossible for the company...to submit to the opinion of any third party; and as to whether they were running at a loss on contract work in general...that was a simple fact that I knew to be true, and which could not be made otherwise by the opinion of any third party...[it was impossible to be submitted] because it would violated...the principle that a man should have the right to manage his own property.”

“The organized working men and women, the producers of the wealth of the world, declare that men, women, and children, with human brains and hearts, should have a better consideration than inanimate and dormant things, usually known under the euphonious title of Property...”