Sublime

More pointedly, he told Kennedy: “I have in my possession the names and amounts paid by him [Hill] to bribe the Minnesota legislature.” However, he never produced any such list. Barnes commented in June 1879, “I think the old man has gone crazy with jealousy and spite.” It is unclear what the associates had actually promised Farley. Promising him a

Harriman and Schiff pressed for the allowance of a one-third interest in the Burlington for the UP, to achieve a soothing community of interest. The Morgan-Hill forces turned them down flat. Such an accommodation, they purred, might represent an illegal “restraint of trade” under federal statute. To understand the fierce struggle that now erupted,

For sheer grit and audacity, Harriman had few rivals, and he now proceeded on a daring, even reckless corporate raid that would shake Wall Street to its very foundations. Since Morgan and Hill had stonewalled his request for a one-third holding in the Burlington, he would proceed to attack them from the rear. He would, instead, stealthily buy contr

The practical methodologies evolved over many years, and were largely the work of John Hall, a gunsmith from Portland, Maine, and inventor of the “Hall carbine” that became notorious when muckrakers dug into the youthful Pierpont Morgan’s dealings with Civil War procurement authorities.

During his second year in the House, he wrote—himself, with no staff assistance—a bill embodying the old People’s Party dream of intensified government regulation of railroads, by giving the government authority over the issuance of new securities by the railroads. Happening, by chance, to see the bill, Louis D. Brandeis, then one of President Wils

To Harriman, the “Q” offered the same advantage it did to Hill: superb access to Chicago and the Upper Midwest. But to him it also offered the counterincentive of a threat; the Nebraska-Billings Gateway extension of the Burlington, in the hands of Hill and Morgan, would allow the NP-GN lines to invade freely the central midwestern heartland of the

Jim Hill wasted little time, after gaining full control of the Saint Paul, Minneapolis, and Manitoba, in sending Farley packing. Hill showed little sensitivity to the old man’s ego, to his greed, or to his clear ability to retaliate. When Farley confronted Hill in the spring of 1879 with the impossible demand that he be made a director of the new c

He became a piece of very high-end, pricey human software with the nose of a bloodhound. There’s a now-famous story of him checking into a Vancouver hotel room that happened to be equipped with binoculars and had a view of a CN rail yard. Harrison spied a locomotive—number 5867—sitting idle. A half hour later, it was still there. He made a call and