Fortune's Children: The Fall of the House of Vanderbilt

There was a reason for the size of their fiefs, for their willingness to buy—and, year after year, to pay taxes on—hundreds of acres that they kept in woods and never used. There was a reason for the height and thickness of the walls around those fiefs. There was a reason for their private police forces and armed guards. They needed vast acreage in

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The extraordinary productivity at Carnegie plants put them in a different class from their competition. During a rail price war in 1897 Carnegie Steel pushed the other companies to the wall by driving rail prices from a previous low of $28 a ton to only $18, and at one point to an almost unimaginable $14. The chief executive of Illinois Steel, its

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