Sublime

Meanwhile, Jim Hill vastly expanded his fuel business. In 1869 he and partners Chauncey Griggs and John Armstrong created a concern called Hill, Griggs and Company, concentrating at first on the cordwood business that he had been interested in for several years. Logging primarily off forestlands to the north, they sold heavily, once again, to the

Morgan was among the first generation of bankers whose clients were primarily private corporations instead of governments, but there were substantial continuities in approach. His mediations among the railroad barons were very much in the tradition of the supranational financial/diplomatic service operated by the Rothschilds and the Barings in

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,

As Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, put it, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington

For the next fifteen years, Flagler and Rockefeller worked side by side, walking to their offices together in the mornings, passing drafts of letters and detailed business documents between their desks during the day, walking home together at night, always planning and calculating. The result of their efforts was Standard Oil, the largest, most

(Rockefeller borrowed aggressively from banks, but those were mostly cash flow loans that were quickly repaid, not long-term investment capital.)