Huntington had survived his partners and buried most of his enemies. He was one of the richest men in America and held unquestioned authority over one of the world’s largest business enterprises. His determination to protect and build the corporation did not waver. In Virginia, he had founded Newport News Shipbuilding, at first to build tugs and freighters that would serve the ports established by his railroads. But Huntington’s nature always reached for more, especially where federal largesse might be involved. He landed big contracts for the battleships that symbolized national power and pride. Within years they rumbled down the Newport slipways: the USS Kentucky, the USS Kearsage. Touring the yard, like Mark Hopkins in Sacramento decades before, Huntington dug bolts and rivets from the ground with his cane, asking the men if this was what they planned to go on doing with his good money. Maybe he was joking. “Five years ago I thought I might live until I was a hundred. Now I know I’ll live to a hundred and ten,” he told a reporter. In Harwinton, Connecticut, the town of his birth, he erected a chapel in honor of his dead mother. To the citizens of Westchester, New York, he presented a library building, stocked with 5,000 books, and aimed his opening speech at the young people he hoped would read them: “Learn to live on less than you earn and thus always have a balance in the bank. This will add much to your happiness and may keep you from temptation. When I was a barefooted boy living among the hills of Connecticut, my mother said to me, ‘Take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves . . . ’”
The sanctimony was very much in the late Victorian style. Such advice wasn’t followed, however, by Clara, his own niece and adopted daughter. Clara had lived with Huntington since the death of her parents when she was a girl. In her twenties now, she had developed a willful and independent streak. In this she’d been encouraged by her stepmother, the formidable Belle, whose point it was that money should be spent. Together the two women agreed Clara would travel in Europe, unescorted by parents, accompanied only by a chaperone. Huntington didn’t like the idea, but the women won him over. Clara went on her way with letters of introduction and lines of credit to London, where she met Prince Francis von Hatzfeldt de Wildenberg, the son of the German ambassador. The prince had dashing good looks and long twirling mustaches. With no money of his own he recognized a fortune when he saw it. He dumped his Parisian mistress, borrowed what he could from friends, and pursued Clara across Europe, from London to Paris, and thence to Vienna, Venice, and Rome. Clara fell in love and wrote her father, not asking his permission to marry, but telling him she was going to. Huntington and Belle sailed from New York in a hurry. There was a scene: Huntington insisted that this nonsense end immediately, Clara threatened to elope. Huntington checked out Hatzfeldt’s background, discovered that he really was the son of the German ambassador, a friend of Bismarck’s, and a prince. This calmed him, a little, but he exploded again when Hatzfeldt told him the sort of dowry he was expecting Clara to bring. Hatzfeldt was trading.
The wedding took place with appropriate magnificence at the Brompton Oratory in London, after a breakfast at the German Embassy. Huntington handed Clara a necklace of eighty diamonds and a magnificent brooch; Belle gave her a diamond star with a huge stone set in the center. As a dowry, Prince Hatzfeldt got $10 million, according to the New York Morning Journal. Other sources suggest $2 million or $5 million. The prince and Clara, now Princess Hatzfeldt, bought a Georgian house on London’s Grosvenor Street and lived in the grandest way at the highest levels of society. The princess bought jewel-encrusted eggs from Fabergé and the glittering costumes she wore to fancy dress balls are now part of the collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The prince owned a stable of horses that he raced at Ascot and Aintree. He also kept a string of illustrious mistresses, all part of the bargain between Gilded Age American loot and decadent European genealogy that seems familiar to us from the novels of Henry James. Back then, though, the influence was moving the other way. In these true-life characters and their stories, the writer found the seedbed for his explorations of aspiration and betrayal. The Villa Castellani on Bellosguardo, owned then by the Huntingtons, featured in both Roderick Hudson and The Portrait of a Lady, while in his notebooks the ambitious James records his excitement at meeting a member of the wealthy and powerful Huntington family: “Great social day for me.”
Huntington’s beard had turned white; likewise the shaggy tufts that stood out from the sides of his otherwise bald head. He wore skullcaps and boaters to keep his pate warm and walked slowly, stiffly with a cane. He’d survived into an entirely different era, what Louis Adamic called “the redeeming dawn of the twentieth century.” The first great explosion of laissez-faire capitalism was almost over. Huntington had lived by the ideas that business was war but business was everything; America wanted to do business. Now society was becoming preoccupied with the division between the haves and the have-nots. It seemed possible that America might really turn left in an extreme way, and he looked increasingly like the outworn creation of a past time, Canute holding his hand against the advancing tide.
With the Railroad Acts of 1862 and 1864, the nation had funded the building of the first transcontinental railroad by issuing thirty-year mortgage bonds that the companies sold to raise cash. Now those bonds were coming due. The government wanted its money back, reckoning the debt at somewhere between $60 to 80 million. Huntington had long been thinking of this moment. Down the years, he’d fended off the issue, pleading with increasing improbability that his spreading, powerful corporations were broke. Now he made a concerted effort to get the repayment delayed indefinitely, for a hundred years anyway. To effect this a funding bill was introduced before Congress, one of his boldest moves.
It was another period of awful economic depression. The Pullman Strike of 1894, taken up by American Railway Union leader Eugene Debs, had begun in Chicago and spread, turning quickly into one of the biggest labor uprisings in American history. In California, railroad traffic was paralyzed. Howling, hooting, brick-throwing throngs crippled locomotives and tipped over and trashed lines of freight cars. “Strikers seized engines, burned bridges, dynamited property,” writes David Lavender. Troops smashed the strike, killing two in San Francisco, and wounding many others. Nationwide the losses to property and business were estimated at $100 million, and many despised and feared the railroad as never before.
In San Francisco, Adolph Sutro, a wealthy mining engineer and landowner, was elected mayor on the Populist ticket, having run on an “anti-Octopus,” platform. He wrote to the Kentucky legislature, demanding that the protective umbrella of the Southern Pacific’s corporate charter be canceled: “Rid us of the horrible monster which is devouring our substance, and which is debauching our people, and by its devilish instincts is every day more firmly grasping us in its tentacles.” Sutro demanded that the government foreclose on the Central/Southern Pacifics’ debts and take the railroad back for the people, together with all the branch lines, terminals, rolling stock, ferryboats, etc. He was advocating socialism, and the battle lines were drawn.
In Washington, Huntington organized an army of lawyers and lobbyists to press for his bill. In San Francisco, the youthful proprietor of the Examiner, William Randolph Hearst, watched with interest, seeing the chance for a crusade that would really put him and his paper on the map. He organized nightly rallies against the railroad. A petition was passed around, and 200,000 signatures were gathered: the C/SP must stump up or else let California take the road. Hearst sent a telegram to his star man, Ambrose Bierce. “Railroad combination so strong in Washington that it seems almost impossible to break them, yet it is certainly the duty of all having interests of coast at heart to make most strenuous efforts,” Hearst wrote. “Will you go to Washington for the Examiner?”
William Randolph Hearst was no communist but a demagogue, a driven, charismatic Harvard dropout, the future model and target for Orson Welles and screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz in Citizen Kane. His father, George Hearst, was a fabulously wealthy miner, one of the original 49ers, who bought his way into the U.S. Senate in 1886. He did this on the Democratic ticket, with the support, nonetheless, of Leland Stanford, who chipped in because Hearst’s opponent was none other than, again, Huntington’s satellite Aaron Sargent. Who said politics isn’t intimate and personal? Certainly in 1880s San Francisco it was. On his election, George made his son a present of the Examiner, a struggling daily with only the third highest circulation in the city. Then in his early twenties, the younger Hearst studied Pulitzer’s New York World and saw how his own paper must go. He racked up the size of the Examiner’s headlines, cleaned the clutter off the front page, told his editors to search for stories about fires, adultery, and violent crime, or, preferably, a combination of the three, and hired at top dollar a staff of famed writers, Bierce being primary among them. Within a year the Examiner’s circulation doubled.
George Hearst hated the railroad because of spats with Stanford and Huntington back in the day, and because of its stranglehold on the state. William Randolph Hearst hated the railroad more theatrically, proclaiming himself a tribune for the people and watching sales soar on the back of his stance. Bierce shared their hatred, for reasons connected to the spiky contrarian core of his identity. In the 1870s, Huntington had denied Bierce a much-needed job as PR man for the railroad, saying, “We don’t want a scribbler. This fellow is uncontrollable.” Huntington was probably right about that. Subsequent to this humiliation, Bierce, who was broke, landed at the Argonaut, owned by Frank Pixley, a stooge on Leland Stanford’s payroll. Having been denied a lucrative place within the corporation, Bierce was forced for a while to boost it anyway. He and Pixley soon decided they disliked each other, but not before Bierce had felt the wriggle of the Octopus firsthand.
So here was the chance for righteous vengeance. To Hearst’s wire he replied: “I shall be glad to do whatever I can toward defeating Mr. Huntington’s Funding Bill.”
The fight was on.
Bierce had served with gallantry in the Civil War, rising through the Union ranks to become an officer. The toss of a coin had decided whether he would stay on in the army or try his hand at journalism. Literature won. He was tall, handsome, death-obsessed, known for his gracious manners and icy detachment. In late 1896, when he arrived in Washington, he was fifty-six, no longer young. He’d already published Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (later retitled In the Midst of Life) and most of The Devil’s Dictionary. His wife had left him. One of his sons had committed suicide. He no longer expected wealth or even happiness, but drew satisfaction in skewering the authority and arrogance that he hated and saw embodied in the aged but still daunting figure of Collis Huntington.
“When Mr. Bierce began his campaign, few persons imagined that the Funding Bill could be stopped. After a time the skill and steady persistence of the attack began to draw wide attention,” wrote the muckraking journalist Charles Edward Russell in 1910.
Bierce’s favorite word was “bosh.” Previously he’d dubbed Huntington’s former partner “Stealand Landford.” Bierce’s genius might have been narrow, but it was real, and very sharp. “The dromedary head of Mr. Huntington, with its tandem bumps of cupidity and self-esteem is only the beginning of this man’s anatomical and spiritual curiosity,” Bierce wrote. “He has one leg in the grave, one arm in the treasury, and one eye on the police.” When Huntington was called before committee hearings, and was asked, again, about the implications of the Colton Letters, and fell back, as usual, on his strategy of evasion and sarcasm, Bierce wrote: “Mr. Huntington appeared before the committee and took his hands out of his pockets long enough to be sworn.” Bierce, who’d done some thinking about the infernal prospects of the afterlife, devised a particular vision of hell for his opponent: “May his eternity be unsweetened by the memory of a dishonest dollar.”
A yearlong barrage of brilliant invective burst like shrapnel. Bierce’s columns, appearing weekly, sometimes daily, were accompanied by scurrilous and exaggerated cartoons that stripped Huntington of dignity and humanity both. He was not only a thief, with his hands in the pockets of the American people; he was a murderer, a child-devouring ogre. “The spectacle of this old man standing on the brink of eternity, his pockets loaded with dishonest gold which he knows neither how to enjoy nor to whom to bequeath, swearing it is the fruit of wholesome labor and homely thrift and beseeching an opportunity to multiply the store, was one of the most pitiable it has been my lot to observe. He knows himself an outmate of every penal institution in the world; he deserves to hang from every branch of every tree of every State and Territory penetrated by his railroads, with the sole exception of Nevada, which has no trees,” Bierce wrote. He tormented Huntington for his stumbling and dithering. He accused Huntington of perjury. He arranged his facts and arguments clearly and without rhetoric when he chose. “It ought to be quite plain that those who unrighteously possessed themselves of $60 million thirty years ago, and who have never given up one cent of either principal or interest have no claim on which to base a demand that would continue the outrageous condition for a hundred years to come.” Often Bierce overstated and oversimplified his case. But this was broadsheet journalism, catching and swelling a public mood of disaffection. A California campaign turned into a national issue and Huntington found himself in the unusual position of facing defeat.
It all happened at close quarters, in Washington, the world he’d controlled for so long. He and Bierce passed each other in the street, glimpsed each other in hotel lobbies. In a committee room, Bierce refused to shake Huntington’s hand. And on the steps of the Capitol, the exasperated Huntington made a show of offering a bribe.
“Name your price,” Huntington said. “Every man has his price.”
“My price is $75 million,” replied Bierce. “If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States.”
The myth of Ambrose Bierce was starting to take shape. His malice was allied with honesty and grandeur. He had no interest in money. Such motives were strange to Huntington, though he understood, and even admired, the granite implacability. “I just wanted to see how big Bierce was,” he said. “I know now.”
Huntington’s reputation was in tatters. It reached the point where congressmen dodged down Washington’s alleys at his approach.
In January 1897 Congress killed the funding bill, 168–102.
“Today Mr. Huntington saw the dishonest work of years come suddenly to naught,” Bierce wrote.
Hearst, his status as crusader now assured, continued to expand his press empire. Bierce had embodied the right stance at the right time, picked the right moment to say: “These people are bleeding us dry and we shouldn’t put up with it.” He became the writer who had licked the railroad.
“Bierce had fought and won a decisive victory over one of the worst monopolies that ever disgraced this country,” wrote Carey McWilliams, a comment typical of Roosevelt-era historians, and it’s true that the episode marked the beginning of the end of the Southern Pacific’s untrammeled political power in California. The Octopus could be beaten. But, for Huntington, all his work was very far from coming to “naught.” True, after further haggling, he was forced to compromise. The debt, agreed at $60 million, would be repaid over ten years in twenty installments. But he didn’t lose the railroad. The Southern Pacific had ten thousand miles of track, sweeping like a crooked arm from Portland in the north, down through California, and east to New Orleans, its main lines and offshoots supporting and supplying the belly of the nation. It had sixteen thousand miles of steamship routes. It was still, as Richard Orsi notes, “the world’s largest transportation corporation.” Huntington was president of eleven companies, on the board of twenty more, and held big interests in twelve others. His real estate included four grand houses, hundreds of thousands of acres of land in California, West Virginia, Mexico, and Guatemala, coal fields in Virginia and Mexico, building lots in San Francisco and Santa Monica, and twenty lots on Riverside Drive in Manhattan. Newspapers speculated endlessly about his wealth. Maybe only he knew how much he was worth. In excess of $100 million, in 1900 dollars? Possibly.
For some time, in Throg’s Neck on Long Island, Belle Huntington had been supervising the building of a mausoleum. The structure, patterned after a Roman temple, was 42 feet long, 28 feet wide, and 24 feet high. The gates were of bronze, the inside marble. It contained sixteen separate burial chambers. Each step into it was hewn from a single piece of granite. It cost $250,000 and could have held a small army, but one word was carved in simple letters over the door: HUNTINGTON. He refused even to look at the place, but there he was buried when he died suddenly on August 13, 1900.
Belle Huntington was among her husband’s mourners, along with his loyal nephew Henry E. Huntington. Princess Hatzfeldt decided not to make the crossing from London, and fewer than twenty attended the funeral. Some obituaries sneered and were scornful. The Examiner couldn’t resist repeating its jibe: “Huntington was ruthless as a crocodile.” The New York Times noted coolly: “The stock market was unaffected by his death because it was known that he had so arranged the affairs of his corporations as to provide for any personal happening.”
Bierce added a definition to his Devil’s Dictionary, under the word “loss”:
Here Huntington’s ashes long have lain,
Whose loss is our own eternal gain,
For while he exercised all his powers,
Whatever he gained, the loss was ours.
Huntington got one very big thing right, though. America doesn’t have socialism. It has corporationism.