Chapter 13 Success
1.
The ready explanation of Galt's rise in a few years to the role of Wall Street monarch
is that he was a master prophet-maker.
The way of it was phenomenal.
His touch was that of genius, daring, unaccountable, mysteriously guided by an inner mentality.
And when the results appeared, they were so natural, inevitable, that men wondered no
less at their own stupidity than at his prescience.
Why had they not seen the same opportunity?
His associates made money by no effort of their own.
They had only to put their talents with the mighty steward.
He took them, employed them as he pleased, and presently returned them twofold, fivefold,
sometimes twentyfold.
But this explanation only begs the secret.
The nature of his unique power is still hidden.
It was in the first manifestation a power to persuade men.
It became a power to command them in virtue of the ability he had to reward them.
This ability was the consummate power, a power to imagine and create wealth.
As it grew, and as the respect for it became a superstition among his associates and a
and a terror to all adversaries, he passed into the dictatorial phase of his career.
Mordecai's thought, it is only that we shall manage him a little, was rudely shattered.
He was unmanageable.
He gave Mordecai and company peremptory orders, and they were obeyed, as they well might be,
since Galt's star had lifted the house of Mordecai from third to first rank in the financial
world.
It had become richer and more powerful than any other house in Wall Street save one, and
that one was its ancient enemy.
Mordecai's courage had fainting fits.
To Zee's heights, he was often unable to follow without a good deal of forcible assistance.
Frequently, he would come to wrestle prayerfully with Galt, begging him in vain to scale down
some particularly audacious plan, whatever it was.
One day they had been at this for an hour.
Galt was pugnacious and oppressive.
They stood up to it.
Mordecai, retreating step by step, had come to bay in a corner, gazing upward, the tips
of his fingers together.
Galt was passing to and fro in front of him, laying down his will, stopping now and then
to emphasize the point by shaking his fist under Mordecai's nose.
Since then the boy from the reception room came to my desk with the name of Horace Potter.
That was awkward.
Potter was a tempestuous man, easily moved to high anger, himself an autocrat, unaccustomed
to wait upon the pleasure of others.
He was personally one of Galt's most powerful supporters, and brought to him besides the
whole strength of the puissant oil crowd, which controlled at that time more available
Five minutes passed.
Of a sudden Potter bolted in.
What is this?
he roared.
Am I one to cool my heels in your outer office?
Galt turned round and stared at him, blankly at first, and then with blazing anger.
How did you get in here? he asked.
By God I walked in, said Potter.
Then by God walk out again, said Galt, turning his back.
I followed him out, thinking to find some mollifying word to say.
He was unapproachable.
The reception room was empty but for Potter and the friend he had with him, an important
banker who was to have been presented to Galt in a special way.
They talked with no heed to me.
He's in one of his damned tantrums, said Potter.
We'll have to chuck it or try again.
The other man got very red.
Why do you stand it?
he asked.
You?
I'll tell you why, said Potter.
We make more with him than with any other man who ever handled our money.
That's a very good reason.
I couldn't help it, I said to Galt afterward.
All right, he said, he won't do it again.
He never did.
And so, one by one, they learned to take him as he was, to swallow their pride and submit
to his moods, all for the same reason.
He had the power to make them rich, richer, richest.
A meeting of the board of directors became a perfunctory formality, serving only to verify
and approve Galt's acts for purposes of record.
On his own responsibility, he committed the company to policies, investments, vast undertakings,
and informed the board later.
Success was his whole justification.
If once that failed him, his authority would collapse instantly.
In a rare moment of self-inspection, after one of his darling visions had come true,
he said,
After all, Coxie, it's the Lord makes the tide rise.
We don't control it.
We only ride it.
It was an amazing tide.
Never was one like it before.
It floated old hulks that had been lying helpless and bankrupt on the sands for years, and when
men began to say it was high enough, that it was time to prepare for the ebb, Galt said
It was yet beginning.
On the day Great Midwestern stock sold at $100 a share, par, he said to Mordecai, that's
nothing.
It will sell at $200.
Buy me 20,000 shares at this price.
I believe you, Mr. Gald, said Mordecai in an awestruck whisper.
Two.
Proceeds of the incessant enormous issues of new securities had been invested first
in the reconstruction of the Great Midwestern itself, and then in the shares of other railroads,
beginning with the Orient and Pacific.
That was the first of a series of transactions.
We now owned outright or controlled by stock ownership no fewer than 15 other railroad
properties besides lake and ocean steamship lines, docks, terminals, belt lines, trolley
systems, forests, oil fields and coal mines.
The Great Midwestern was the vertebra of an organism ramifying east, west, north and south.
It reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with Antennae to Asia and Europe.
Its treasury was inexhaustible, fed by so many streams.
Not only did our own earnings increase amazingly as all those other properties poured their
traffic into us, but the Great Midwestern treasury received dividends on the shares
by which it controlled those traffic bringers. Thus we garnered twice. There was yet a third
source of profit. As the Great Midwestern acquired new properties, Galt rebuilt them
out of their own earnings, or by use of their own credit, so that their value increased.
Thus they brought us traffic, they paid dividends into our treasury, and at the same time they
were so enhanced in physical value by Galt's methods of development that they were soon
All this was in each case so obvious once it had happened and yet so remarkable in the aggregate that people could scarcely believe it.
A writer in one of the financial papers exclaimed,
named, If these figures are true, then the Great Midwestern Railway Company could go
out of the railroad business entirely and live richly on the profits that appear from
its investments in the securities of other railroads.
And the figures were true.
3.
Galt's name rose to impersonal eminence.
The properties embraced in the Great Midwestern organism were referred to as GALT properties.
Their securities were GALT bonds or GALT stocks.
The acts of the Great Midwestern were not its own.
They were GALTS.
There was a GALT influence which reached beyond his own domain.
Once an important railroad system in which neither he nor the Great Midwestern had any
direct interest was about to reduce its rate of dividend.
The directors on their way to the meeting said they would vote to reduce it, but they didn't.
When the meeting was over they were asked why they had changed their minds.
The explanation was that Galt had sent word to them that he wished them not to do it.
He said it would be a shock to public confidence and that he would divert enough traffic to
the road to enable it to earn the dividend it had been paying.
And presently, Wall Street people were talking of a galt crowd, or a galt party, meaning
all that group of men associated with him in his undertakings.
The magazines discovered him.
For a long time he would not be interviewed.
There was nothing to talk about, he said.
Why did they pester him?
They wrote articles about him notwithstanding, because he was a new power in the land, and
and so much of the information they put forth was garbled or immature that he was persuaded
at last to submit to a regular interview.
The writer assigned to the task was at that time a famous interviewer.
He came one evening to the house by appointment and waited in the great drawing room.
I was with him giving him some advice when Galt came in, wearing slippers, the heels
of which slapped the floor at every step.
He sat in a large chair, crouched himself, stared for a full minute at the interviewer
through large shell spectacles, justifying, I afterward remembered, the interviewer's
impression of him as a huge, predatory, not unfriendly spider.
Suddenly he spoke, saying,
Ain't you ashamed to be in this business?
Everybody has something to be ashamed of, said the interviewer.
What are you ashamed of?
That pleased Galt.
He loved a straight hit on the nose, and it turned out to be a very successful interview.
What the public knew about him was already enough to dazzle the imagination.
What it didn't know, not yet at least, was more surprising.
His private fortune became so great that he was obliged to think what to do with it.
Unerringly he employed it in means to greater power.
Neither too he had relied mainly upon the support of individuals and groups of men who
put their money with him.
Now he began on his own account to buy heavily into financial institutions, and before anybody
knew what he was doing he had got working control of several great reservoirs of liquid
capital such as chartered banks and insurance companies.
The use of this was that he could influence them to invest their funds in the securities
of the Great Midwestern and its collateral properties.
That made it easier for him to sell the new stocks and bonds which he was endlessly creating
to provide money for his projects.
His passion to build burned higher and higher.
Any spectacle of construction fascinated him.
We stood for an hour one morning at the corner of Broadway and Exchange Place watching a
new way of putting down the foundation for a steel building.
Certain caissons were sunk in the ground by a pneumatic principle to a great depth and
then filled with concrete.
The building was to be twenty stories high.
Have you noticed, I asked him, how the skyline of New York has changed since steel construction
began?
If you haven't seen it from down the bay or across the river for several years, you
wouldn't know it.
I haven't, he said.
Yes, of course, it must be so.
An hour later in the office he called me to the window.
See that handful of old brick rookeries down here?
Find place to build.
Let's do something for your skyline.
In his mind's eye was the mirage of a skyscraper thirty stories tall with the great Midwestern's
executive offices luxuriously established on the top floors.
A year later, it was there, and we were there.
Most men are superstitious about leaving the environment in which success has been bearded
and made docile.
Was he?
I never quite knew.
All this time we had remained in those dark, awkward old offices with their funny walnut
furniture.
Not a desk had been changed.
A new rug was bought for the president's room when Valentine left and Galt moved in,
and Harbinger, restored to the room Galt had moved him out of, asked for some new linoleum
His last act in this setting was dramatic.
Word came one Saturday morning that the demonic Missouri River was on a wild rampage with
a sudden mind to change its way.
Three towns that lay in its path were waiting helplessly to be devoured and there was no
The government's engineers were frantic, calling for help, with no idea where it was to come from.
Galt got Chicago on the wire and spoke to the chief of his engineer corps,
a man to whom mountains were technical obstacles and rivers a petty nuisance.
The Missouri River is cavorting around again, said Galt.
Now listen, yes, take everything we've got, men, materials and equipment.
Men, Materials and Equipment. Hello? Anything you need, including the right-of-way. I don't
care what it costs, but put a ring in her nose and lead her back to her trough. This
order is unlimited. It takes precedence over mail, business and acts of providence. Go
like hell. Hello? That's all.
Then he walked out for the last time and never once looked back. On Monday morning he walked
4.
At about this time, quite accidentally, there shaped in his thoughts that ultimate project,
which lies somewhere near the heart of every instinctive builder.
One evening at dinner, Natalie said, I wonder why we have no country place.
Everyone else has.
Galt stopped eating and looked at her slowly.
Why of course, that's it, he said.
I've been wondering what it was we didn't have, looking at it all the time like the
He approached it in a characteristic manner at once.
There was somewhere a topographic map of New Jersey.
It was searched for and found, and he and Natalie lay on the floor with their heads
together exploring it.
First, he explained to her how one got the elevations by following the brown contour
lines and what the signs and figures meant.
Then this must be a mountain, she exclaimed.
Right, he said, you get the idea.
Here's a better one, look here.
Oh, but see this one, she said, look, all by itself.
He examined her discovery thoughtfully.
It was a mountain in northern New Jersey, the tallest one,
two small rivers flowing at its feet, a view unobstructed in all directions.
You've found the button, he said, I believe you have.
The whole family went the next day on a voyage of verification and discovery.
It was all they had hoped for.
Natalie was ecstatic in the role of Columbus.
Fancy!
She had found it on a map, no bigger than that, and here it was.
Mrs. Galt was acquiescent and a little bewildered.
Mrs. Galt and Vera perceived the difficulties and had no sense of how they were to be overcome.
Galt imagined an estate of 50,000 acres, of which this mountain should be the paramount
feature, miles of concrete roads, a power dam and electric light plant large enough
to serve a town, a branch railroad to the base of the mountain, a private station to
be named Galt, and finally, the most impossible thing he could conceive, a swift electric
elevator up the mountain.
The business of acquiring the land began at once. The mountain itself was easy to buy.
Many old farmholders in the valley were obstinate, but he got the heart of what he wanted to
begin with. The rest would come in time. And construction plans of great magnitude were
soon underway.
The house in Fifth Avenue was, in one sense, a failure. It had not reduced Mrs. Valentine.
only made her worse. The social feud was unending. Well, now he would show them a country place.
And this, though he knew it not, was to be his castle on a hill, inaccessible and grand,
A Place of Refuge, the feudal, immemorial symbol of power and conquest.