Silver Kings and Other Royalty
Though the families of the famous Big Four of the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific railroads—the Crockers, Huntingtons, Hopkinses, and Stanfords—had managed to glide more or less effortlessly into San Francisco’s high society of culture and refinement, a second Big Four—the so-called Silver Kings—had more difficulty. It was a question of occupational status. Railroads, after all, were somehow a respectable endeavor. Railroads provided a comfortable and fashionable form of travel. Every really rich man had his private railway car. Everyone also invested in railroad stocks, which virtually had the endorsement of the United States government. Mining, on the other hand, was pick-and-shovel stuff, an occupation for roughnecks and gamblers. Most of the overnight gold and silver fortunes had been frittered or gambled away as rapidly as they had been made. Even John Sutter, on whose property California gold had first been discovered, setting off the gold rush, had died a poor man living in a boardinghouse on a meager pension.
The Silver Kings—or the Irish Big Four, as they were sometimes called—were James C. Flood, William S. O’Brien, James Gordon Fair, and John William Mackay. Jim Flood, described by Dixon Wecter as a “poor gamin of the New York streets,” had, like so many of his contemporaries, gone west with the gold rush. But instead of heading for the hills as others did, Flood settled for the ramshackle village with rutted streets—whose hilltop mansions still looked incongruous and out of place on the frontier-town horizon—that was then downtown San Francisco. In San Francisco, Flood met another Irishman, Will O’Brien, and the two pooled their small resources to set themselves up in a storefront bar and grill called the Auction Lunch Rooms. It got its name from the Gold Exchange, near which it was located. Flood’s job was to mix the drinks, which he did in generous proportions, and O’Brien worked behind the stove, where he soon received a certain neighborhood celebrity for his Irish fish chowder, thick with potatoes. The Auction Lunch Rooms soon became a popular gathering place for traders on the exchange, as well as for miners, who periodically came down from the hills to disport themselves in the city’s fancy houses and to partake of hearty food and drink.
Inevitably, in addition to cooking and bartending, the two partners were able to eavesdrop on certain gold-related conversations, and, lubricated by whiskey, the miners and the traders occasionally revealed more about their business than they should have. It wasn’t long before Flood and O’Brien, who had never set foot in a mining camp, had developed a fairly good feel for gold and silver mining. One particularly promising tip concerned the Comstock area outside Virginia City. And so, taking in two Irish friends, John Mackay and Jim Fair, as partners to provide further financial backing, the foursome set off for Virginia City to stake a claim. It was one of those rare occasions when a prospector’s very first explorations yielded a bonanza, and the Comstock was even more than that. What the foursome discovered was the largest and most valuable single pocket of silver ever unearthed in the world—a huge vein of shiny metal some fifty feet wide. The initial estimates of the value of the Comstock Lode placed it at $300,000,000, but even that turned out to be on the low side. From its discovery in 1859 until its final depletion ten years later, the Comstock would yield, all told, over $500,000,000 worth of silver, making Flood, Fair, Mackey, and O’Brien four of the world’s richest men.
William O’Brien took his share of the Comstock riches and retired to lead a quiet, unpublicized life. He had no use for society and was content simply to nurse his fortune. Not so Jim Flood. Perhaps no other individual in the history of American capitalism catapulted himself from squalor to glittering splendor in so short a time as the ex-bartender, who shared the glitter with his wife, a former chambermaid. Instant riches, to Flood, demanded instant luxury, and one of his first orders was for the construction of a massive brownstone mansion at the very top of Nob Hill, catercorner to the Mark Hopkins mansion. (Flood’s house was so sturdily built that it was one of the few buildings in the city to survive the great earthquake and fire of 1906.) Flood also built another palatial house in suburban Menlo Park, which became known locally as “Flood’s Wedding Cake” and was described by the late Lucius Beebe as “a miracle of turrets, gables, and gingerbread.” It was seven stories high, surrounded by porches, painted white, and topped by a huge square tower supporting a pyramid that resembled the Eiffel Tower. So much carpeting was required to cover the floors of these two houses that John Sloane, the carpet dealer from New York who was brought in to handle the job, had to station representatives in California to supervise the carpet-laying, and soon found it simpler and more economical just to open a branch of his store in San Francisco.
Still, for all their display, the James Floods did not find it easy to break into San Francisco society. They were considered “uncultivated” and “lacking in refinement,” as, to be sure, they were. Flood had to have his valet give him instructions on how to tie a necktie, though Mrs. Flood, who had waited on ladies of the gentlefolk, had learned some lessons in comme il faut. The Floods were fortunate, however, in that they had a beautiful daughter. Jennie Flood became an instant belle of San Francisco, famous for her fine dark hair, her wit, charm, and devastatingly large and flashing eyes. All the most eligible bachelors in the city were at Jennie’s feet, and the Floods were certain that Jennie would marry well. In 1879, Jennie Flood was courted by no less than a United States President’s son, Ulysses S. Grant, Jr., and the prospect of this match so pleased her father that he promised to build the pair an immense château in Newport as a wedding present. Alas, young Grant, it seemed, had an eye for all the ladies of the moment, and, returning from a trip east, he delayed so long in reaching Jennie Flood’s house—“dallying along the way with Dora Miller and other adorables,” as the Chronicle’s society writer put it—that Jennie angrily broke the engagement. Later she was admired and squired about by the British Lord Beaumont, and once more the Floods’ hopes for a brilliant match were raised. But Lord Beaumont’s courtship came to nothing, and in the end Jennie Flood never married anyone at all and died a spinster. She remained, however, a colorful and popular figure in San Francisco.
James Gordon Fair, meanwhile, earned the distinction of being the least likable of the Irish Four; he had managed to earn the nickname of “Slippery Jim” very early in his career. Born in Belfast in 1831, Jim Fair came first to Chicago at the age of twelve, and then moved westward at the age of eighteen. By the age of thirty, with his Comstock millions, he had a mill in Nevada, where he became chiefly responsible for driving San Franciscans out of Nevada development—making many enemies in the process—which he then managed to take over himself. He got the Nevada state legislature (which in those days elected U.S. senators) to appoint him to the Senate, where his career was undistinguished.
He had one particularly nasty habit. He enjoyed giving misleading tips on the stock market. Jim Fair’s acquaintances soon learned that if Fair recommended a stock it was certain to go down, but before discovering this fact a number of people had been stung. In 1861, Fair married an Irish girl named Theresa Rooney, by whom he had four children—Theresa (Tessie), Virginia (Birdie), Charles, and James. At one point Mrs. Fair asked her husband to recommend a stock in which she could invest some money. Jim Fair then gave her a surefire tip, adding that she must promise not to tell any of her friends. Fair knew that his voluble wife could not keep a secret, and so Mrs. Fair and all her friends invested in the stock in question. It soon became worthless. “That,” declared Fair, “will teach you a lesson.” For this and other reasons Mrs. Fair divorced him and received custody of all the children except young James. Fair’s namesake hated and dreaded his father, and soon after the divorce he committed suicide. Charles Fair made a youthful marriage that so displeased his father that he disinherited him, and shortly afterward young Charles and his bride were killed in an automobile accident. Both Birdie and Tessie made “brilliant” society marriages: Birdie married William K. Vanderbilt and Tessie married Hermann Oelrichs. Both girls specified that their father not be invited to their weddings, and as it came about, both marriages turned out unhappily. Birdie and Vanderbilt’s ended in divorce. Tessie’s marriage lasted, and Tessie went on to become one of the reigning dowagers of Newport, but she had always shown signs of mental instability. She had great manic rages, followed by black depressions. In her manic periods she would try to set fire to the curtains of her house. In her depressions she would remain in her bed for days. In the end she was declared insane.
Slippery Jim Fair became an alcoholic and, in the process, a bigamist. On various drunken sprees he took a series of women to the altar, promising each of them a share of his fortune. Following these marriages, he would disappear and his various wives would attempt to find him. In his last years Fair lived alone in a San Francisco hotel, solitary, bitter, completely without friends and estranged from his entire family. When he died in 1894 at the age of sixty-three his personal and financial affairs were in such a hopeless tangle that his will offered fifty dollars apiece “to any widows or children” of his who might be able to prove themselves such.
In the second generation the Flood family also had financial problems brought on by romance. In the 1930s a young woman sued Jim Flood’s son, James L. Flood, claiming she was his illegitimate daughter. And it turned out that she was. Witnesses appeared to testify that they had seen James Flood wheeling the child up and down the street in a baby carriage. She was awarded seven and a half million dollars.
By far the most attractive, and probably the most talented, of the Irish quartet was John William Mackay. Mackay was a tall, slender, handsome man with deep-set eyes, a gentle nature, and a generous heart. After his first important strike in the mother lode, in which he made two hundred thousand dollars, he announced that this was enough money for any man and that “the man who wanted more than that was a fool.” He had gone into the Comstock venture with more capital than his other partners and as a result had a two-fifths share of that bonanza—a fact that doubtless caused him to raise his estimate of how much money a prudent man needed. He had been born in Dublin in 1831 into a virtually penniless family, and at the age of nine, at the onset of the great potato famine, had emigrated to America. He first worked in New York as an apprentice shipbuilder, but when tales of western gold began to circulate, he headed for California. There he worked as a pick-and-shovel man for four dollars a day, but he shrewdly insisted on receiving only part of his pay in cash. The rest he asked for in stock in the mining company.
Thus when the mother lode came in he found himself a moderately rich man. In 1867, after the Comstock had made him a hugely rich man, he heard a sad tale of a poor widow in Virginia City, Louise Hungerford Bryant. Mrs. Bryant, the daughter of a New York barber, had married and gone west with her husband, and had been left with a small daughter and younger sister and virtually without resources. Mackay organized a collection for her, and, having gone to her house to give her the money, promptly fell in love with the young woman. When he asked her to marry him, he warned her to judge him for his qualities as a man, not on the basis of his money. As he reminded her, “Circumstances in the mining business change quickly.” But even if he lost everything he had, he promised her, “I can always dig a living with my bare hands.” And he swore to protect her—“with my fists, if need be.”
Mackay not only did not lose all his money but went on to make a great deal more. In 1874 he and his wife moved from Virginia City to San Francisco, and two years later they came east to New York. Though neither of the Mackays had any formal education to speak of, or any “breeding” in the social sense, they were both endowed with a gentle and soft-spoken Irish attractiveness and charm. Being rich didn’t hurt them either, and they made friends easily. Nevertheless they were snubbed by New York society, which was then ruled by Mrs. William Astor and run by her social arbiter, Ward McAllister. But when the Mackays moved on to Europe they were welcomed everywhere. With their good looks and manners they charmed everyone, including the Prince of Wales, who called John Mackay “the most unassuming American I have ever met.”
In 1883, back in New York, John Mackay formed the Commercial Cable Company and went to battle against Wall Street titan Jay Gould’s Western Union telegraph monopoly. The financial community was certain that Gould, known as an unscrupulous, crafty fighter, would destroy the “Irish upstart,” as Mackay was labeled, and was filled with awe for Mackay when Mackay won. He was twice nominated to the United States Senate and both times modestly refused to run. But he was still a fighter, and in 1891, when he was sixty years old, he had a chance to make good his early promise to his wife. A series of articles about Louise Mackay had been appearing in newspapers in both the United States and England stating that she had once been a washerwoman and later had sunk “even lower than that,” having sent her tiny daughters into the streets of Virginia City begging with tin cups. Mackay set out to find the instigator of these stories, a man named Bonynge, and one day spotted him through a window of the Bank of Nevada. Mackay let himself into the bank through the back door and headed straight for Mr. Bonynge, who was taken completely by surprise. Whereas Adolph Spreckels had used a revolver to exact his revenge on an offending newspaperman, Mr. Mackay chose manlier means according to Oscar Lewis in Silver Kings. “I struck out with my right,” Mackay said, “and hit him in the left eye. Then I hit him again.… I’m not so handy with my fists as I used to be twenty-five years ago on the Comstock, but I have a little fight in me yet, and will allow no one to malign me or mine.”
Of the Irish Big Four, Mackay was also by far the most philanthropic, and a complete tally of his gifts will probably never be made, because when he gave to a charity that interested him he nearly always insisted on anonymity. He lent and gave away millions of dollars to friends and business associates, and these transactions were always unrecorded. Two of his biggest gifts, however, could not be hidden—the Mackay School of Mines in Reno and the building of the Church of St. Mary’s in the Mountains in Virginia City. Throughout his life he refused to discuss his money, and when he died in 1902 his business manager told reporters, “I don’t suppose he knew within twenty millions what he was worth.”
While the fortunes of Flood, Mackay, Fair, and O’Brien were giving the city of San Francisco an “Irishtocracy,” as it was called, other ethnic groups were emerging as economic forces to be reckoned with. In addition to the de Youngs (who never really advertised themselves as Jewish), a number of German Jewish families were achieving prominence in banking and retailing, among them the Haases, the Hellmans, the Zellerbachs, the Dinkelspiels, the Schwabachers, the Koshlands, the Fleischhackers and the specialty-store Magnins. “We are particularly fortunate here,” as San Franciscans are proud of saying, “in having such a lovely class of Jewish people.” Once, when old Mrs. Daniel Koshland explained to Phyllis de Young Tucker that she would not be able to attend a certain civic function because she was observing the festival of Succoth, Mrs. Tucker said, “Oh, how I envy you your traditions!” Somewhat tartly Mrs. Koshland replied, “You have a few of your own if you’d care to invoke them.”
A number of Italian families were also becoming important in San Francisco, including the Ghirardellis (with a chocolate factory), the Aliotos (in the fishing industry), and the Baldocchis (in the retail flower business). The most spectacular Italian American success story, however, belongs to Amadeo Peter Giannini, whose little Bank of Italy, originally designed to serve the banking needs of his “own kind,” became the giant Bank of America, the largest commercial bank in the world. Giannini, the stepson of a Genoese produce merchant, first got into the moneylending business by making loans to immigrant small farmers who brought their produce into San Francisco from the outlying valleys. His first important break occurred at the time of the 1906 fire, when he was able to load his entire supply of gold—some eighty thousand dollars’ worth—into a pair of produce wagons and escape with it to San Mateo, where, lacking a safe, he hid the gold in the ash pit of his fireplace. After the fire, when other San Francisco bankers were urging a bank holiday, a six-month moratorium on loans, and the issuance of scrip instead of cash to withdrawing depositors, A. P. Giannini was able to open up shop behind a plank set on two barrels beside the Washington Street Wharf, where he conducted business as usual.
Giannini was an innovative banker in several ways. For one thing, he devised a then very novel floor plan for his bank. Instead of placing his officers behind the scenes or separated from the public by cages, Giannini scattered them at desks about the central banking lobby. The effect was good psychologically—it made the officers of the bank seem accessible to the customers—and this design eventually was copied by commercial banks throughout the country. He was also a pioneer, in California, of branch banking, and opened his first branch bank in San Francisco’s Mission District in 1907, and his second in San Jose. Soon small branches of the Bank of America were opening in rural communities—which had never had banking services before—throughout the state. His favorite customers were businessmen with small-capital, high risk enterprises, such as farmers. He distrusted the oil business and—unwisely, perhaps—invested little in real estate. But he did see a future in southern California’s fledgling motion picture business, and all the major movie studios, along with the great movie czars of their day, were built up with the help of loans from Mr. Giannini’s bank at a time when more established banks were dismissing Hollywood as a cottage industry.
Long before these upstart twentieth-century fortunes were made, familiar rifts had begun appearing between members of California’s older moneyed families. A crack had even appeared in the façade of the railroading Big Four. By the late 1880s only two of the four remained active. Hopkins had died, and Crocker had been incapacitated in 1886—ironically, for a railroad man, because of a fall from a horse-drawn carriage—and would die two years later. Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford now fell to bickering.
It had all started in 1885 when former Governor Stanford shouldered aside Huntington’s best friend, A. A. Sargent, in order to run for the Senate. Huntington began saying that Stanford’s sole contribution to the Southern Pacific after lifting the first shovelful of dirt was hammering home the golden spike, which he had accomplished only with difficulty after several clumsy misses. Stanford retaliated by calling Huntington “an old fool” and saying that he would trust him only as far as he could “throw Trinity Church up the side of Mount Shasta.” Huntington spoke mockingly of the imperial way Stanford, as president of the Southern Pacific, ran his railroad. Whenever Leland Stanford’s private car passed through, all railroad crews in the vicinity were required to stand at rigid attention, and all passing locomotives were ordered to blow their whistles in salute.
Leland Stanford was indeed a curious man. He weighed more than three hundred pounds—in the history of American politics he was perhaps outweighed only by William Howard Taft—but aside from his size and solidity he was most noteworthy for his silences. The Mount Shasta remark is possibly the only known example of the Stanford “wit.” For the most part he was a mountain of muteness, often sitting for hours at a time staring straight into space, saying nothing. At times like these his associates often worried that Mr. Stanford might have died. When asked a question—even such a simple one as “How are you?”—he would pause for long minutes before forming an answer. It is possible that he was not very bright, and it is ironic that the Stanford name should now be associated with a great institution of higher learning. In social situations Stanford was without conversation. A visitor from England, invited to dine alone with the great rail magnate at his house, recalled the horror of spending an evening with a completely uncommunicative host. Desperately the dinner guest went from subject to subject, to none of which Stanford responded with as much as a word or a nod. At first the guest was sure that he was boring Stanford. Then he decided that Stanford might be sleepy, though the host’s eyes stayed glassily open. Finally the guest concluded that Stanford must be gravely ill, though when the long evening was eventually over, Stanford rose, saw his guest to the door, shook his hand and said, “Thanks for the chat.”
As a politician Stanford gave long, windy speeches—always written for him by underlings—that were full of rhetoric but, on analysis, short on content. It was impossible for him to speak extemporaneously or without a prepared text. Once at an outdoor gathering where he was speaking a sudden gust of wind blew the manuscript pages of his long speech off the lectern and scattered them in all directions. Stanford simply stopped speaking and stood gazing dully at his audience for the ten minutes or so it took to gather up the pages and reassemble them in their proper order. Actually, Leland Stanford’s inarticulateness became one of his greatest assets as a politician. Watching this large man painstakingly read his boring speeches, the average voter found it impossible to believe that a man of such towering dullness was not a man of complete honesty and probity. When interviewed by the press, Stanford was without opinions and therefore completely uncontroversial. It hardly seemed likely that behind his impassive façade was a man who purchased laws and legislators with cheerful abandon when it was to the benefit of his railroad.
There were occasional brief though misleading hints that Stanford might have had a sense of humor. After eighteen childless years of marriage Mrs. Stanford, in 1868, had finally produced an only son, Leland Stanford, Jr. When the baby was only a few weeks old the Stanfords invited a large group of friends for dinner. When the guests were seated, a butler entered carrying a large covered silver serving tray and placed it in the center of the table. “My friends, I wish to introduce my son to you,” said Mr. Stanford. The lid was then lifted, and there lay the baby on a bed of fresh flowers. The tray and the baby were then passed around the table for the guests to admire. A few might have been tempted to laugh, but a look at the host’s solemn face assured the assemblage that this was no joking matter.
The feud between Huntington and Stanford simmered for several years, until Huntington at last saw a chance to make his move. Confronting Stanford, Huntington claimed to have gained access to “certain papers” and “documents” in “the Sargent matter” which would conclusively prove that Stanford had purchased his Senate seat at the expense of Mr. Sargent. Huntington’s price for silence on the Sargent matter was the presidency of the Southern Pacific, and he asked Stanford to step down. Apparently this blackmail threat sufficiently frightened Stanford. He resigned the presidency, and the new president became Collis P. Huntington. But Huntington was still not through with Stanford. The railroad’s new president immediately went back on his word and announced to the press not only that Stanford had bought his election but that he had bought it with funds purloined from the railroad’s treasury.
Needless to say, the two men never spoke to each other again—nor, thereafter, did their wives, who had been friends. Both Stanford and Huntington—each man convinced that the other had plans to assassinate him—took to traveling with heavily armed guards at their sides. It was a feud that would only end with Leland Stanford’s death, of natural causes, in 1893.