Vanderbilt grew up on Staten Island, the son of ambitious farmers who were determined to profit from the commercial bounty being frantically pursued in the booming city across the bay. But as a self-taught, self-made entrepreneur, he had no equal. Like their fellow patricians across the Atlantic, they tended to equate good breeding with the right to rule. During the early years of the republic, most rich Americans had inherited their wealth from mercantile or planter ancestors. That respect stemmed, in part, from how he earned his fortune. Hated, revered, resented, he always commanded respect, even from his enemies.” Stiles says in this perceptive and fluently written biography, “but he was never a phony. “Vanderbilt was many things, not all of them admirable,” T. But like other corporate giants of his era and ours, he saw no reason to apologize for manufacturing and managing commodities everyone wanted and needed. Vanderbilt was the richest man in 19th-century America at his death in 1877, he possessed, at least on paper, one-ninth of all the American currency in circulation. If Americans were not grateful for the many steamships he built, the major railroad lines he integrated into a common system, the stock market panics he soothed and the Grand Central Terminal he constructed with his own millions, that was their fault, not his. No wonder that in this most capitalist of nations, our leading capitalists usually garner as much suspicion as love.Ĭornelius Vanderbilt spent little of his long life fretting over his image. Some of the corporate rich then try to enhance their reputations with ostentatious philanthropy. Tycoons get blamed for making the marketplace less free, for corrupting politicians, for exploiting the ordinary folk who work in their companies. Yet we assume that anyone so big must also be bad. We marvel at their cleverness and daring - and envy the manifold pleasures they buy and discard at whim.

Americans have always been ambivalent about men who turn small businesses into gigantic ones.

The first tycoon by tj stiles