“Death is not the end,” wrote Ambrose Bierce, soon to vanish into Mexico and become a legend, “there remains the litigation over the estate,” and the stories of what happened to those piles of money the Associates had amassed reveal yet another aspect of American capitalism’s hustle and flow.
Collis Huntington, when he died, made few charitable bequests. The bulk of his estate passed to Belle and his nephew Henry E. Huntington, who quickly sold their interests in the railroads to E. H. Harriman, one of a new generation of economic barons, a dapper little man, a bold manager who built an empire by consolidating those of others. Harriman paid some $20 million for their shares, acting through the Union Pacific, which he had already acquired, and Belle and Henry E., having cashed out on a grand scale, married each other, thus reuniting the bulk of Collis’s fortune. One can imagine the great persuader smiling from within the walls of his gaudy mausoleum, though not at how his heirs then proceeded to spend their wealth. For Belle it was the high living to which she’d grown accustomed: jewels, mansion, and villa, setting up her family like European royalty. Henry E. Huntington, who had previously collected paintings, especially by the English artist Thomas Gainsborough, switched his obsession to books. Not just any books, naturally: he bought a Shakespeare first folio, a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the Ellesmere Chaucer, and on and on. He acquired priceless manuscripts and editions with the same fever that a Russian oil billionaire might devote these days to watches and sports cars. For twenty years, H. E. bought every important collection that came on the market; other collectors settled for what he didn’t want. He built a ranch in San Marino, California, where his library came to be housed, and, having spent some $40 million on these treasures, put them in trust for the public use, a princely gift and a magnet for scholars. Today, the name Huntington is still remembered, not because of the railroads Huntington ruled, or the fortune he made, but for the way his nephew spent that fortune, on history, on learning.
Leland Stanford’s finances were a mess when he died. Estimates of his fortune vary. He was worth, perhaps, $25 to $40 million, but left obligations totaling $18 million, and probate kept the estate locked until a lawsuit concerning the railroad’s debt to the government was settled. Jane Stanford was determined at all costs to keep Stanford University open and to preserve the memory of her husband and their son. She cut her staff and sold her pearls. She walked, having no carriage, and rather enjoyed playing the martyr. “I was left a legacy of debt, trouble, and worry; I am without money and cannot realize on securities,” she wrote. She was, of course, making a comparison with previous grand opulence; still, her determination was heroic, and the university prevailed, survived, and prospered, entwining the name Stanford with the notion of Californian achievement in perpetuity, even if now most people have forgotten who Leland Stanford was and most of what he did. Jane Stanford herself died in agony in a Honolulu Hotel on February 28, 1905, a very grand and forbidding old woman, convinced that she’d been poisoned. The coroner’s report indeed concluded that “strychnine had been introduced into a bottle of bicarbonate of soda with felonious intent.” Bertha Berner, her longtime companion, came under suspicion, and was cleared. A doctor had bungled, it seemed, either through the administration of medicine, or else later, in the postmortem analysis. Charlie Crocker’s wealth remains strongly associated with the very fabric of San Francisco; it has hung in there, in the shape of art galleries, museums, hotels, street names. Charlie’s son, William H. Crocker, went on running the Crocker Bank and was a major force in the reconstruction of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake. The shameless Nob Hill mansions were either leveled by the quake or destroyed in the fires that followed, and the Crocker family donated an entire city block for the building of Grace Cathedral, designed by the English Gothic-revival architect G. F. Bodley and finally completed in 1964. In 1974, the Crocker Bank’s Carmichael branch was robbed by members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a terrorist group. A customer died, shotgunned, during the hold-up. Patty Hearst, the media heiress who had been kidnapped by the SLA and then joined them, was sitting outside in the getaway car. Hearst, of course, was the granddaughter of William Randolph, arguably the Southern Pacific’s most effective foe, and a weird historical circle was joined. A few years ago, Wells Fargo bought out the Crocker Bank.
The monkish, hardworking Mark Hopkins was the quietest of the Associates, and the best liked. His entire life and career were devoted to the avoidance of crisis and incident. Ironic, then, that so much controversy and story would come to cluster around the $30 million or so that he left. The signs were there, Mary Hopkins having begun to spread her wings even before Mark died. And when he did, she grew imperious and threw off all restraint. Offended by her friends in San Francisco, whom she thought were laughing at her pretensions and her new beau (Edward F. Searles, an interior decorator twenty years her junior), Mary abandoned the vast Nob Hill mansion she’d built and moved east, acquiring her house in Manhattan, another on Block Island, and big chunks of property in Massachusetts. She married Searles, who brought along a friend, Arthur T. Walker, to live with him and his new wife. Walker was described as a “companion”; most likely he was Searles’s lover. Mary didn’t seem to mind. She commissioned McKim, Mead, and White to build her a huge stone chateau, then fired them once they’d submitted a design. Construction went ahead, under the supervision of Edward Searles, who inherited Mary’s estate when she died. Timothy, the son she’d adopted with Mark, was by then on the railroad board; cut out of the bulk of the will, he brought suit. Searles settled out of court for $10 million. When Searles died in 1920, he left the rest of the money to his friend Walker, who, though worth a fortune, lived alone in an unfurnished two-story Brooklyn walk-up, surrounded by seventeen cats. Various of Searles’s relatives now went to court, and like something out of Dickens’s Bleak House, the money dribbled away in settlements and fees. Suits surrounding the Hopkins estate became so frequent and lucrative that in the 1920s lawyers, private eyes, and con men scoured the countryside and phone books, hunting for relatives and prospective claimants. The gorgeous arts and crafts Massachusetts chateau that Mary Hopkins and Searles built still stands. An order of Catholic nuns now lives there.
Some of this is funny, some of it sad, but somehow none of it is surprising, and all of it seems particularly, indeed inevitably, American. Fortunes are hard to get, harder for future generations to hold onto, and this is good, the acquisition and dissipation of huge wealth being the brute motor of America’s aspirational wheel. Money takes strange paths, but better this than in England, for example, where the richest private individual is, and always will be, the Duke of Westminster, whoever he happens to be at any given time, since huge swaths of central London real estate are held on leasehold, the freeholds coming back to the Westminster estate again and again.
A traditional approach to the story of the great nineteenth-century capitalists is that they were robber barons, ruthless bandits who plundered the country for its land and money before seeking to restore their reputations in history through philanthropies as sensational as their original thefts had been brazen. In this version the grand gesture doesn’t quite forgive the hand in the till, but helps us forget it. That’s one passionately argued line. More recently, historians have argued with equal verve that what really matters about men like the Associates is their astounding ingenuity and boundless energy. Without them, no America. At the time, and in their circumstances, there was no other way for them to proceed than how they did: rapaciously. Their greed was really a good thing, spurring the Industrial Revolution with which the formation of the post–Civil War nation went hand in hand. They created wealth and opportunity, not just for themselves, but for everybody, and invented the can-do, up-for-grabs business spirit that has typified American success ever since.
In other words, the story of the building of the railroads is ideologically pulverizing. It cuts to the heart of how we feel about business and whether political power is, or should be, the handmaiden of economic power.
The Associates defined the nature of the modern corporation. They put in place highly effective middle-management teams, built hospitals for their workers and gave them health insurance. Even according to Frank Norris, they were benevolent employers. But they introduced, too, the idea that a corporation can keep government in its pocket. They created the concrete physical shape of California and confirmed its underlying ethos of boom and bust, of swift bucks and scrambling immigrant labor. They tricked entire communities into paying for what they themselves were determined to bring and maybe the communities didn’t really need or want; but, then again, as a character says in The Octopus, “California likes to be fooled.”
In 1893, on the trip to Europe during which the French reporters quizzed him about the Eiffel Tower, Huntington returned to Paris to buy some art. Belle had been encouraging him to become knowledgeable on the subject, and on the walls of their Fifth Avenue mansion hung pictures by Corot, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, Hals, Reynolds, Romney, Utrillo, and others, pictures that now hang on the walls of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Huntington being Huntington, he regarded these as more than trophies. He bought some because he liked them, others because he recognized their value as investments. He didn’t make many mistakes. He had the eye. On this occasion, he picked up a canvas by Jean Georges Vibert, a satirical picture depicting a gaunt and ascetic missionary telling of his travails and adventures to an audience of plump cardinals. One cardinal is being shaved. One leans back languidly. Another sips a drink. The painting became one of Huntington’s favorites, not because of its particular financial value but because, I suspect, he saw much of himself in it, in the missionary, the man of commitment and action, and the cardinals too, with their bored air of power. He’d been on both sides.
The next day the same dealer brought over a number of canvasses to Huntington’s rooms and invited him to select any of them for $2,000 each. Huntington frowned at them all, except one, an unsigned piece titled The Guitar Player about which he haggled, buying it finally for $750. It turned out, of course, to be a Vermeer.
Huntington later said: “I saw the money in it.”