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NOTE XIII. Success

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Chapter 13 Success

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1.

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The ready explanation of Galt's rise in a few years to the role of Wall Street monarch

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is that he was a master prophet-maker.

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The way of it was phenomenal.

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His touch was that of genius, daring, unaccountable, mysteriously guided by an inner mentality.

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And when the results appeared, they were so natural, inevitable, that men wondered no

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less at their own stupidity than at his prescience.

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Why had they not seen the same opportunity?

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His associates made money by no effort of their own.

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They had only to put their talents with the mighty steward.

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He took them, employed them as he pleased, and presently returned them twofold, fivefold,

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sometimes twentyfold.

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But this explanation only begs the secret.

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The nature of his unique power is still hidden.

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It was in the first manifestation a power to persuade men.

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It became a power to command them in virtue of the ability he had to reward them.

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This ability was the consummate power, a power to imagine and create wealth.

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As it grew, and as the respect for it became a superstition among his associates and a

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and a terror to all adversaries, he passed into the dictatorial phase of his career.

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Mordecai's thought, it is only that we shall manage him a little, was rudely shattered.

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He was unmanageable.

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He gave Mordecai and company peremptory orders, and they were obeyed, as they well might be,

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since Galt's star had lifted the house of Mordecai from third to first rank in the financial

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world.

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It had become richer and more powerful than any other house in Wall Street save one, and

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that one was its ancient enemy.

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Mordecai's courage had fainting fits.

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To Zee's heights, he was often unable to follow without a good deal of forcible assistance.

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Frequently, he would come to wrestle prayerfully with Galt, begging him in vain to scale down

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some particularly audacious plan, whatever it was.

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One day they had been at this for an hour.

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Galt was pugnacious and oppressive.

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They stood up to it.

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Mordecai, retreating step by step, had come to bay in a corner, gazing upward, the tips

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of his fingers together.

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Galt was passing to and fro in front of him, laying down his will, stopping now and then

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to emphasize the point by shaking his fist under Mordecai's nose.

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Since then the boy from the reception room came to my desk with the name of Horace Potter.

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That was awkward.

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Potter was a tempestuous man, easily moved to high anger, himself an autocrat, unaccustomed

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to wait upon the pleasure of others.

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He was personally one of Galt's most powerful supporters, and brought to him besides the

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whole strength of the puissant oil crowd, which controlled at that time more available

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Five minutes passed.

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Of a sudden Potter bolted in.

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What is this?

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he roared.

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Am I one to cool my heels in your outer office?

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Galt turned round and stared at him, blankly at first, and then with blazing anger.

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How did you get in here? he asked.

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By God I walked in, said Potter.

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Then by God walk out again, said Galt, turning his back.

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I followed him out, thinking to find some mollifying word to say.

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He was unapproachable.

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The reception room was empty but for Potter and the friend he had with him, an important

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banker who was to have been presented to Galt in a special way.

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They talked with no heed to me.

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He's in one of his damned tantrums, said Potter.

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We'll have to chuck it or try again.

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The other man got very red.

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Why do you stand it?

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he asked.

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You?

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I'll tell you why, said Potter.

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We make more with him than with any other man who ever handled our money.

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That's a very good reason.

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I couldn't help it, I said to Galt afterward.

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All right, he said, he won't do it again.

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He never did.

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And so, one by one, they learned to take him as he was, to swallow their pride and submit

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to his moods, all for the same reason.

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He had the power to make them rich, richer, richest.

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A meeting of the board of directors became a perfunctory formality, serving only to verify

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and approve Galt's acts for purposes of record.

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On his own responsibility, he committed the company to policies, investments, vast undertakings,

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and informed the board later.

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Success was his whole justification.

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If once that failed him, his authority would collapse instantly.

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In a rare moment of self-inspection, after one of his darling visions had come true,

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he said,

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After all, Coxie, it's the Lord makes the tide rise.

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We don't control it.

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We only ride it.

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It was an amazing tide.

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Never was one like it before.

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It floated old hulks that had been lying helpless and bankrupt on the sands for years, and when

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men began to say it was high enough, that it was time to prepare for the ebb, Galt said

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It was yet beginning.

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On the day Great Midwestern stock sold at $100 a share, par, he said to Mordecai, that's

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nothing.

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It will sell at $200.

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Buy me 20,000 shares at this price.

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I believe you, Mr. Gald, said Mordecai in an awestruck whisper.

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Two.

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Proceeds of the incessant enormous issues of new securities had been invested first

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in the reconstruction of the Great Midwestern itself, and then in the shares of other railroads,

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beginning with the Orient and Pacific.

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That was the first of a series of transactions.

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We now owned outright or controlled by stock ownership no fewer than 15 other railroad

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properties besides lake and ocean steamship lines, docks, terminals, belt lines, trolley

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systems, forests, oil fields and coal mines.

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The Great Midwestern was the vertebra of an organism ramifying east, west, north and south.

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It reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with Antennae to Asia and Europe.

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Its treasury was inexhaustible, fed by so many streams.

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Not only did our own earnings increase amazingly as all those other properties poured their

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traffic into us, but the Great Midwestern treasury received dividends on the shares

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by which it controlled those traffic bringers. Thus we garnered twice. There was yet a third

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source of profit. As the Great Midwestern acquired new properties, Galt rebuilt them

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out of their own earnings, or by use of their own credit, so that their value increased.

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Thus they brought us traffic, they paid dividends into our treasury, and at the same time they

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were so enhanced in physical value by Galt's methods of development that they were soon

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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.

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A writer in one of the financial papers exclaimed,

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named, If these figures are true, then the Great Midwestern Railway Company could go

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out of the railroad business entirely and live richly on the profits that appear from

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its investments in the securities of other railroads.

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And the figures were true.

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3.

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Galt's name rose to impersonal eminence.

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The properties embraced in the Great Midwestern organism were referred to as GALT properties.

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Their securities were GALT bonds or GALT stocks.

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The acts of the Great Midwestern were not its own.

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They were GALTS.

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There was a GALT influence which reached beyond his own domain.

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Once an important railroad system in which neither he nor the Great Midwestern had any

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direct interest was about to reduce its rate of dividend.

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The directors on their way to the meeting said they would vote to reduce it, but they didn't.

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When the meeting was over they were asked why they had changed their minds.

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The explanation was that Galt had sent word to them that he wished them not to do it.

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He said it would be a shock to public confidence and that he would divert enough traffic to

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the road to enable it to earn the dividend it had been paying.

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And presently, Wall Street people were talking of a galt crowd, or a galt party, meaning

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all that group of men associated with him in his undertakings.

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The magazines discovered him.

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For a long time he would not be interviewed.

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There was nothing to talk about, he said.

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Why did they pester him?

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They wrote articles about him notwithstanding, because he was a new power in the land, and

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and so much of the information they put forth was garbled or immature that he was persuaded

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at last to submit to a regular interview.

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The writer assigned to the task was at that time a famous interviewer.

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He came one evening to the house by appointment and waited in the great drawing room.

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I was with him giving him some advice when Galt came in, wearing slippers, the heels

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of which slapped the floor at every step.

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He sat in a large chair, crouched himself, stared for a full minute at the interviewer

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through large shell spectacles, justifying, I afterward remembered, the interviewer's

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impression of him as a huge, predatory, not unfriendly spider.

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Suddenly he spoke, saying,

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Ain't you ashamed to be in this business?

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Everybody has something to be ashamed of, said the interviewer.

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What are you ashamed of?

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That pleased Galt.

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He loved a straight hit on the nose, and it turned out to be a very successful interview.

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What the public knew about him was already enough to dazzle the imagination.

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What it didn't know, not yet at least, was more surprising.

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His private fortune became so great that he was obliged to think what to do with it.

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Unerringly he employed it in means to greater power.

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Neither too he had relied mainly upon the support of individuals and groups of men who

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put their money with him.

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Now he began on his own account to buy heavily into financial institutions, and before anybody

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knew what he was doing he had got working control of several great reservoirs of liquid

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capital such as chartered banks and insurance companies.

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The use of this was that he could influence them to invest their funds in the securities

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of the Great Midwestern and its collateral properties.

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That made it easier for him to sell the new stocks and bonds which he was endlessly creating

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to provide money for his projects.

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His passion to build burned higher and higher.

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Any spectacle of construction fascinated him.

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We stood for an hour one morning at the corner of Broadway and Exchange Place watching a

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new way of putting down the foundation for a steel building.

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Certain caissons were sunk in the ground by a pneumatic principle to a great depth and

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then filled with concrete.

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The building was to be twenty stories high.

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Have you noticed, I asked him, how the skyline of New York has changed since steel construction

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began?

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If you haven't seen it from down the bay or across the river for several years, you

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wouldn't know it.

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I haven't, he said.

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Yes, of course, it must be so.

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An hour later in the office he called me to the window.

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See that handful of old brick rookeries down here?

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Find place to build.

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Let's do something for your skyline.

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In his mind's eye was the mirage of a skyscraper thirty stories tall with the great Midwestern's

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executive offices luxuriously established on the top floors.

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A year later, it was there, and we were there.

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Most men are superstitious about leaving the environment in which success has been bearded

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and made docile.

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Was he?

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I never quite knew.

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All this time we had remained in those dark, awkward old offices with their funny walnut

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furniture.

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Not a desk had been changed.

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A new rug was bought for the president's room when Valentine left and Galt moved in,

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and Harbinger, restored to the room Galt had moved him out of, asked for some new linoleum

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His last act in this setting was dramatic.

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Word came one Saturday morning that the demonic Missouri River was on a wild rampage with

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a sudden mind to change its way.

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Three towns that lay in its path were waiting helplessly to be devoured and there was no

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The government's engineers were frantic, calling for help, with no idea where it was to come from.

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Galt got Chicago on the wire and spoke to the chief of his engineer corps,

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a man to whom mountains were technical obstacles and rivers a petty nuisance.

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The Missouri River is cavorting around again, said Galt.

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Now listen, yes, take everything we've got, men, materials and equipment.

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Men, Materials and Equipment. Hello? Anything you need, including the right-of-way. I don't

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care what it costs, but put a ring in her nose and lead her back to her trough. This

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order is unlimited. It takes precedence over mail, business and acts of providence. Go

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like hell. Hello? That's all.

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Then he walked out for the last time and never once looked back. On Monday morning he walked

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4.

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At about this time, quite accidentally, there shaped in his thoughts that ultimate project,

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which lies somewhere near the heart of every instinctive builder.

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One evening at dinner, Natalie said, I wonder why we have no country place.

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Everyone else has.

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Galt stopped eating and looked at her slowly.

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Why of course, that's it, he said.

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I've been wondering what it was we didn't have, looking at it all the time like the

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He approached it in a characteristic manner at once.

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There was somewhere a topographic map of New Jersey.

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It was searched for and found, and he and Natalie lay on the floor with their heads

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together exploring it.

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First, he explained to her how one got the elevations by following the brown contour

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lines and what the signs and figures meant.

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Then this must be a mountain, she exclaimed.

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Right, he said, you get the idea.

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Here's a better one, look here.

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Oh, but see this one, she said, look, all by itself.

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He examined her discovery thoughtfully.

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It was a mountain in northern New Jersey, the tallest one,

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two small rivers flowing at its feet, a view unobstructed in all directions.

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You've found the button, he said, I believe you have.

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The whole family went the next day on a voyage of verification and discovery.

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It was all they had hoped for.

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Natalie was ecstatic in the role of Columbus.

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Fancy!

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She had found it on a map, no bigger than that, and here it was.

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Mrs. Galt was acquiescent and a little bewildered.

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Mrs. Galt and Vera perceived the difficulties and had no sense of how they were to be overcome.

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Galt imagined an estate of 50,000 acres, of which this mountain should be the paramount

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feature, miles of concrete roads, a power dam and electric light plant large enough

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to serve a town, a branch railroad to the base of the mountain, a private station to

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be named Galt, and finally, the most impossible thing he could conceive, a swift electric

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elevator up the mountain.

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The business of acquiring the land began at once. The mountain itself was easy to buy.

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Many old farmholders in the valley were obstinate, but he got the heart of what he wanted to

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begin with. The rest would come in time. And construction plans of great magnitude were

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soon underway.

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The house in Fifth Avenue was, in one sense, a failure. It had not reduced Mrs. Valentine.

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only made her worse. The social feud was unending. Well, now he would show them a country place.

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And this, though he knew it not, was to be his castle on a hill, inaccessible and grand,

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A Place of Refuge, the feudal, immemorial symbol of power and conquest.