This book explores America’s explosive growth and expansion beginning with the Industrial Revolution when the Erie Barge Canal made New York the Empire State and the money grabbers found that it was far cheaper to buy politicians than to pay taxes or employees making New York City the shyster capital of the planet.
I positively loved the author’s amazing collection of rags to riches financial roller coaster rides. It is compiled in perfect historical sequence detailing the unremitting wealth scavenging of those who would never have enough.
Excerpts:
Five trunk lines now plied between the Atlantic and the Great Lakes at Chicago. Numerous “middle railroads” radiated out of Chicago across the Rocky Mountains, four additional transcontinental lines were virtually completed to the Pacific Coast in the same decade, which saw the laying of over 70,000 miles of track.
During a generation, the natural impulses of the railroad barons, as of the captains of industry, led them to set upon each other, with sandbag or in ambush. With the levers of giant machines in their hands they would effect destruction, dispersion and anarchy, engulfing the millions of citizens over whom they had power of life and death.
Limited in their capacity of enjoyment and bored, yet prompted to outdo each other in prodigality, the New Rich experimented with ever new patterns or devices of consumption. In the late 70’s, the practice of hiring hotel rooms or public restaurants for social functions had become fashionable. At Delmonico’s the Silver, Gold and Diamond dinners of the socially prominent succeeded each other unfailingly. At one, each lady present, opening her napkin, found a gold bracelet with the monogram of the host. At another, cigarettes rolled in hundred-dollar-bills were passed around after the coffee and consumed with an authentic thrill. One man gave a dinner to his dog, and presented him with a diamond collar worth $15,000. At another dinner, costing $20,000, each guest discovered in one of his oysters a magnificent black pearl. Another distracted individual longing for diversion had little holes bored into his teeth, into which a tooth expert inserted twin rows of diamonds; when he walked abroad his smile flashed and sparkled in the sunlight. As the years pass new heights of fantasy and extravagance are touched…
...The organization of “conspicuous waste” by the owners of masses of money may be said in fact to have had a clear economic justification. Yet to effect a redistribution of wealth in this fashion was a stupendous and well-nigh impossible task which was never to be completed.
