美国传奇大佬范德比尔特的故事，他的传奇之处几乎无人可及。他看到了蒸汽船的机会，是船运大佬；同时看到了铁路的机会，成为了铁路大亨，还控制了西联汇款等公司，他也是金融大佬，亲自搞了几次影响历史的金融创新。这么传奇人物的传记也是今年读的第一步大部头，还是非常有收获的，照例做些摘要。
In 1816, a Senate committee found that it was as expensive to move a ton of goods thirty miles overland as it was to bring the same ton across the Atlantic from Europe. John Lambert described how in upstate New York goods were carried in narrow, four-wheeled wagons, each drawn by a team of two horses. “It is a very rough method of riding,” he complained, “for the waggon has no springs, and a traveller ought to have excellent nerves to endure the shaking and jolting of such a vehicle over bad roads.” A movement emerged, a rush to build turnpikes—solidly engineered roads, financed by tolls. Turnpikes, Lambert observed, “have tended greatly to improve the country; for as soon as a [turnpike] is opened through the woods… the country which was before a trackless forest becomes settled.” Even the best turnpike was suited only for short distances, and it was cheaper to move goods by water under any circumstances.
When George Washington died on December 14, 1799, for example, the news took seven days to travel the 240 miles from northern Virginia to New York. Under these conditions, few institutions straddled state lines or operated across long distances—even as Americans began to cross the Appalachians by the thousands.Americans naturally looked for a revolution in transportation. In 1817, New York State began to construct an enormous canal, 363 miles long, between Albany and Buffalo, a village on Lake Erie. Equally important, a dramatic technological breakthrough had appeared on the North River: a vessel that provided its own motive power, independent of wind and muscle and current. They called it the steamboat. Just twenty-three years old, he was now supposedly worth $15,000, including $9,000 in cash. But the Vanderbilt of legend was always one step ahead of everyone else. He shrewdly concluded that the economy was about to change, and so he abandoned his enterprises to ride the incoming wave.
机会来自于直接的需求。1816年没有像样的公路，美国大陆上30英里的吨运费居然高到和从美国到欧洲横穿大西洋的运费一样。华盛顿这么大的人物去世了，240英里的消息传递需要7天。跨洋之所以价格能下来，就是蒸汽船。当时的陆地解决方案主要是收费公路，但也只能解决短途问题，这就让23岁的老范看到了蒸汽船到机会，虽然已经身价不菲，依然毅然投身其中。
Until the Revolution, wrote historian Bernard Bailyn, Americans had assumed “that a healthy society was a hierarchical society in which it was natural for some to be rich and some poor, some honored and some obscure, some powerful and some weak.” Perhaps most important, “it was believed that superiority was unitary, that the attributes of the favored—wealth, wisdom, power—had a natural affinity to each other, and hence that political leadership would naturally rest in the hands of social leaders.” In New York in particular, these natural leaders came from a closed set of families, distinguished by an inherited prestige.
19世纪之前的财富主要靠家族传承，没有现在这么多的创业机会。有趣的是这段描述，健康的社会本身应该是等级制的，自然会两极分化，就像太极一样有阴有阳，这也是自然选择的结果。消灭阶级就是让社会停止发展，怎么可能。
The aristocrats saw no conflict of interest in using public office to enrich themselves. As society’s natural leaders, they reasoned, they should be entrusted with economic stewardship as well. This outlook, this merging of the private and public roles of the elite, was the essence of mercantilism, in which the state empowered private parties to carry out activities thought to serve the public interest.13 The standard reward for such an undertaking was a monopoly—just what Chancellor Livingston sought when he offered to meet a most pressing public need, the need for steamboats.
早期的重商主义不只是重视这么简单，而是被允许用公权力让贵族和统治者个人发财致富，这里面没有利益冲突，是被鼓励的。国家通过重商主义来支持私营企业发财致富，也会让私营企业承担起来公共服务的职责作为交换。这个安排很有意思，也是资本主义早期发展所必然的。反观中国历史，除了盐商有一点点类似的做法，几乎没有如此，更多的是官商体系打着国家名义肥了自己，搞出来各种贪腐，而不是公共服务。今天对个别领域的私营企业的支持倒是有点类似的味道了。
The monopoly lawyers would argue, as they successfully had before, that the government of New York had created a valuable property right and the Court was bound to protect it. The public, on the other hand, grew ever more hostile to the idea that the state could carve up the economy and assign a portion to a prestigious family. By 1824, more and more Americans demanded a market open to any who dared to venture in, an economy as democratic as the political arena increasingly was.66 Ogden’s attorneys were also to assert a state’s authority to interfere with interstate commerce. The claim affronted both Webster’s nationalism and his economic vision. If it prevailed, it would establish a constitutional rule that would turn the United States into a collection of feuding principalities, each erecting its own barriers to trade.
On March 2, Marshall led the associate justices into the courtroom and began to read the majority opinion—his own opinion—to the crowd that packed the basement, straining in utter silence to hear every word. He began by paying tribute to the immense authority of the New York courts, whose decision was now at issue. Then he struck at the heart of the matter. “Commerce, undoubtedly, is traffic,” he said, “but it is something more; it is intercourse.” Hardly another word was necessary. As the Evening Post succinctly put it, “The Steam Boat grant is at an end.”And yet, there is much truth in these earlier assessments, especially when the case is set in a context larger than constitutional law. Marshall captured and codified a new mood in the country, after nearly fifty years of independence. Commerce, interstate commerce in particular, was the stuff of daily life as never before. The chief justice proclaimed that, yes, the United States was a common market; no matter how the states would later eat away at the edges of his ruling, he gave voice to what most Americans now believed—that freedom of movement and trade across state lines was a basic right.
老范的业务遇到了传统政府授予个别家族垄断权力的障碍，依然决定起诉。其实不是个人能力，而是时代和人民的呼声自发的开始发对这种垄断，需要一个让敢于冒险的人可以自由参与的开放市场。所以真是时代造就英雄，当然英雄也必须提前卡在合适的位子上才行。商业就是交通，还不止于此，还是人的交往。大法官的决定达成了美国统一市场，再次重申自由贸易和自由流动是一项公民的基本权利，也带来了全新的机会。
Vanderbilt seemed to be nothing but energy as he burned through the year on the hunt for every possible source of profit. On summer Sundays, when William had the Thistle sitting idle, Vanderbilt leased the Bellona to take New Yorkers to the Union Garden on Staten Island. He even arranged to sell the manure from Bellona Hall’s stables to James Neilson, a self-styled gentleman farmer. Meanwhile he supervised the construction of a new vessel for the Union Line. Christened the Emerald, it was a “splendid new steam boat,” as it was advertised, and he proudly took command. But not for long.
In early 1828, Vanderbilt launched the first steamboat that was entirely his: the Citizen, a speedy 106-foot, 145-ton sidewheeler. With cousin John Vanderbilt and little brother Jacob alternating as captain, the Citizen connected Elizabethtown to New York with stops on Staten Island’s northern shore. Cornelius also bought shares in the New Brunswick Coal Mining Company (a hint that he was interested in new sources of energy for steamboats), again demonstrating his ease with the complexities of the new economy.
老范是非常合适的商人，一心扑在赚钱上，什么都干。正是这样才有了监督建造新的蒸汽船的机会，这也是一个时代的开启。36岁的老范有了自己的第一艘蒸汽船，公民号，他还直接买了煤矿的股份，很有先见之明。
Newly mobile, self-interested, unbound by the old culture of deference, this emerging nation of strangers gave rise to an aggressive spirit of enterprise. They called it “go-ahead.” It became a New York catchphrase, for this business-minded city began to overflow with the chosen people of go-ahead, the New England Yankees. From farmboys to clerks to merchants, they invaded Manhattan and made it the capital of “the universal Yankee nation,” as P. T. Barnum called it.”
三十年代美国的企业家精神的萌芽：区别于过去的服从文化，体现出更灵活、更自我、更不受限的企业家精神，就是“干就完了”
Stockton maneuvered the Stevenses into merging their well-financed railroad with his undercapitalized canal on February 15, 1831, creating the “Joint Companies,” as the enterprise was known. The immense size of this new entity gave it the leverage to extract a remarkable bounty from the legislature: “That it shall not be lawful… to construct any other railroad or railroads in this State, without the consent of said companies.” By signing over such a valuable piece of its sovereignty to a consortium of wealthy men, New Jersey earned the snide nickname “the Camden & Amboy State.” The price for its virtue was an annual fee of $30,000 and a limit of $3 on the through fare (three times what Vanderbilt charged). The Stevenses had finally brought order out of the anarchy of competition—or bought order, to be precise.
1831年的铁路公司和运河公司合并出来了大型的“合资公司”。大公司甚至拿到了铁路建设的垄断权。
Fortunately for Vanderbilt, whose entire business was transportation, transportation was precisely where the next opportunity appeared. The first rattling, chuffing, clanking trains of steam-drawn railway cars captured the public imagination—and no better example could be found than the Camden & Amboy the special project of the Stevens family. It set off what one magazine called a “fever,” for both the faster travel and the rich profits it promised to bring. “If any doubt existed as to the excitement about railroads,” it argued in 1831, “it could have been removed by a view of the crowds thronging for stock to the… Camden.” With the line now complete, the national press breathlessly reported that it carried passengers thirty-five miles in one hour and forty-six minutes, cutting the passage from New York to Philadelphia to just seven hours and forty-five minutes. On November 8, 1833, Vanderbilt sailed over to South Amboy to examine it for himself.
1833年 39岁的老范再次遭遇生死，1832年刚刚经历瘟疫——霍乱大爆发，卧床3个月，差点死去。大人物往往都有类似的生死经历。
So began the Bank War, the result not merely of Jackson’s obsessions, but the cultural crisis of the times. It broke out because two great waves now crashed into one another: the individualistic, anti-aristocratic, competitive impulse fostered by the Revolution, and the instinct to organize, amalgamate, develop, and bring order to the chaos of the marketplace. The first impulse was both radical and traditional, combining a suspicion of the wealthy elite with an outlook shaped by this world of small farms, stores, and workshops, where factories were few and self-employment was the standard. The second was both commercially advanced and highly conservative, as wealthy men both organized banks and corporations and tried to tamp down competition. Neither impulse was hostile to the market economy itself; indeed, out of this conflict would emerge a new American economic outlook, a culture that embraced equality of opportunity and fierce competition, as well as sophisticated business institutions.
In the Jacksonian mind, the fear of monopoly and aristocracy was intertwined with a deep anxiety over the mysterious abstraction of commercial institutions. Features that were gradually emerging as standard for all corporations—their legal character as artificial persons, immortality and limited immunity which protected shareholders from liability for a corporation’s acts—they saw as strange and alarming special privileges granted through political favoritism. “All corporations are liable to the objection that whatever powers or privileges are given to them, are so much taken from the government or the people,” wrote Leggett. And so government had given rise to a race of man-made monsters, with the Bank merely chief among them. “If a man is unjust, or an extortioner, society is, sooner or later, relieved from the burden, by his death,” glowered Gouge. “But corporations never die.” The implications were frightful. Since they “live forever,” fretted Massachusetts governor Marcus Morton, their property was “holden in perpetual succession”—unlike individuals, whose estates were divided upon death. Eventually corporations would own everything.”
美国的崛起还不是独立，而是这种个人主义、平民主义、鼓励创业精神的崛起，以及对贵族的垄断权力的打破。公司成为虚拟的法人实体，可以不死，受到独立于股东个人财产的保护，从政府获得相应的牌照和授权，既获得利润，也代替政府角色服务于公共利益。今天的公司似乎成为了一种个人的获利工具，股东至上，不再考虑任何公共利益，实际是一种短视。
At the time, the division between the two seemed as natural as a canyon. The Democrats had emerged out of the resistance to the eighteenth-century patricians and their culture of deference, out of battles against the limited franchise, aristocratic privileges, and mercantilist monopolies. Though their elected leaders often would make use of the government’s economic power, the most radical among them—especially New York’s “Locofoco” faction (nicknamed after the brand of matches they used when their rivals at a tumultuous party meeting doused the lights)—championed laissez-faire as their definition of equal rights. The Whigs (such as Hone) inherited some of the ordering, top-down outlook of the old elite, and a deeply moral vision of the role of the state. They believed that measures to assist the most enterprising, such as corporate charters or public works, would grace everyone; as historian Amy Bridges writes, they believed “the state should guide interdependent interests to a common good.” As development-minded modernizers in a young and growing country, they saw competition as a destructive force that punished entrepreneurship”
追寻杰克逊的人创办了民主党，追求个人平等和有限政府，要求简单的共和制和实现真正的市场经济。辉格党则更相信要积极发挥政府的作用，搞大政府，继承了传统精英从上到下的垄断和制度，他们看起来市场竞争是一种破坏性力量。这种争论其实相当有必要，因为实际情况是：有些领域要竞争，有些领域要避免竞争，不应该一刀切。
He ordered the Lexington for a very simple reason: cotton. As the 1830s rushed past, cotton powered the American economy forward. Demand from British textile mills had already caused a westward-moving land rush across the South by cotton planters, dramatically expanding slavery into new territories. Slave-owning Americans had even settled the Mexican province of Texas. “Funds from the Northeast and England financed the transfer of slaves, purchase of land, and working capital during the period of clearing the land,” writes economic historian Douglass C. North. Once cultivated, harvested, and pressed into bales, the cotton enriched not only the planters, but also the merchants, shippers, and financiers of New York.
老范看到了棉花的机会，订购了新船莱克星顿。这让我很有感触，老范的蒸汽船生意看似只是船运本身，但实际要站在整个社会发展的角度去思考，不能太沉溺于日常生意，要看到未来，看到新增量，提前下手和布局才行。老范就是这样的高人，40岁左右看到了棉花在美国南方的大发展，正成为当时的新型产业机会。
The question of transportation between the two cities attracted the attention of the nation’s greatest minds and richest men. In 1830, those rich men organized corporations to construct railroads radiating out of Boston. If ever corporations were necessary, it was now, for railways were far more costly and far more complex than textile mills. Curiously, their organizers never wanted to create those corporations in the first place. Historian John Lauritz Larson argues that New England’s first railroad promoters initially planned their lines as public works, to be built and owned by the state. But the state governments refused, due to the failure of various canals and turnpikes to replicate the success of New York’s Erie Canal. “Thus it was in frustration that Massachusetts’s railroad pioneers turned to private corporations,” Larson writes. This very specific political history set the pattern for American railroads nationwide. Though they were public works in the broadest sense—increasingly important as the common carriers of commerce—they were also private property, owned by individuals who pursued their own interests. In the end, these circumstances would define Vanderbilt’s historical role as public figure and private businessman.
历史在很大程度上会是巧合。今天中国的大型基建大都是国家力量。回到美国当时，大家也知道铁路是公共工程，也想由政府来建设。但一个个失败就让政府不敢再尝试了，转而出现了私营公司的机会，才有了股份公司的大发展。要不是政府先失败了，估计也没有美国私营企业的机会。这也让老范通过铁路、运输生意成为一个历史性角色，既是成功的商业，也服务于公众利益。
As the Lexington tied up at the India Dock in Providence, Hone wrote in his diary, “The prospects in Wall Street are getting worse and worse.… The accounts from England are very alarming; the panic prevails there as bad as here. Cotton has fallen. The loss on shipments will be very heavy, and American credits will be withdrawn. The paper of the southern and western merchants is coming back protested.”Hone’s analysis was sound. Americans had climbed upward on a pyramid of debts that ultimately rested on high expectations for cotton prices. Instead, the restriction of credit by the Bank of England had been followed by a collapse of the cotton market. It was a classic speculative bubble. Hone had invested hope, and his supply of hope was gone.
Vanderbilt slithered unsinged through the financial fire. He had no speculative embarrassments, no debts pledged against consignments of cotton. True, the stocks he owned may have lost some of their market value; their dividends may have been suspended; the promissory notes he held may have gone unpaid. But he had demanded premium real estate as collateral; his property consisted largely of state-of-the-art steamboats; and his was a business that remained in demand. Indeed, he had an abundance of that most valuable item in a deflationary panic: cold, hard cash—piles of silver shillings and gold dollars paid for fares. Even weakened by illness, Vanderbilt remained an instinctive predator, and, like every predator, he was drawn to the scent of the sick and the vulnerable. To him, the great Panic of 1837 was a time for the hunt.
1837年美国棉花投机+银行滥发纸币导致的世界经济危机，也放到了当时国内的胡雪岩。美国的债务危机出现，英格兰银行抽贷，让棉花价格大跌，棉花投机告一段落。这样的故事反复上演，直到今天。老范也损失很大，但最后能够安然无恙，有个好的现金流生意真是十分关键，可以利用危机加大下注，才成就自己。不浪费每次危机太重要了。
Soon after that first locomotive opened the route, Cornelius Vanderbilt investigated the line for himself. His nearly fatal accident four years earlier had not made him hostile to trains, as some later claimed; he keenly understood that control of traffic on Long Island Sound lay in the strategic balance between steamboats and railroads—and between rival railroads, as this and other lines neared completion. So he took a steamer to Stonington, boarded a train, and rode up the line to “Providence. “There’s nothing like it,” he told the line’s chief engineer three years later. “The first time I ever traveled over the Stonington, I made up my mind.” It was the fastest route to Boston, potentially the key to the entire battle for the Sound. And yet, the Stonington was a crippled giant. Its exorbitant construction costs “were a scandal,” according to one railroad historian. “Its fifty miles, through a far from forbidding territory, had taken $1,300,000 in stock and $1,300,000 in bonds.” Everyone who looked into its affairs could see that the interest on that staggering debt would weigh heavily for years to come.Strategically situated, financially vulnerable, the Stonington gave Vanderbilt much to think about as he returned to New York.”
第一次坐火车就发生了事故，死里逃生。但老范四年后依然能继续尝试并看好火车，这就是商人最难的的直觉和眼光：不受个人一时运气或苦难的局限。一眼就看到了商场上决胜负的关键因素：铁路是最快的选择。
The steamboat trade had always been the most aggressively competitive business in America. Its fare wars, populist advertising, and highspeed racing embodied the nation’s individualistic, unregulated society. It also embodied its mechanized, unregulated violence, with its deadly boiler explosions and reckless desperation to defeat the opposition.
当时的船运生意就是今天的互联网竞争，非常激励。价格竞争、广告竞争、速度竞争，全面竞争。所以很多生意今天看是传统了，但也有当初如日中天的时刻。早期竞争的状态和民主党想法一致，成传统生意了，反而回归了共和党/辉格党的精英秩序，没那么大的竞争、稳定的格局和安静的赚钱。
Marx says somewhere that men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves. He forgot to add that great plans often come about by accident. How many times had Vanderbilt embarked on important enterprises only because of chance? His start in steamboats under Gibbons, his Dispatch Line to Philadelphia, his lower Hudson route, his People’s Line to Albany, all originated in the unexpected. He was quick to turn trouble to his advantage, and to prey on the weak and vulnerable.”
马克思说历史是人民创造的，但并不是按人民的意愿或喜好来创造的。意外具有极大的价值，常常是奇迹的起点。所以不能墨守成规。
Now committed to full-scale warfare, Vanderbilt battered his opponents with his grasp of both tactics and strategy. His main strength was, in a word, everything; the attack was nothing less than an all-enveloping onslaught, omitting no possible competitive advantage. He was better capitalized than his opponents, which enabled him to absorb losses. But he also could make money even in a fare war, thanks to his ability to control costs. In part, this was a technical advantage: the Lexington’s engine and hull design had saved an estimated 50 percent in fuel expenses, by far the largest operating cost, and all his later boats followed its plan. He kept personnel expenses down by shifting them to his customers; passengers began to complain that they were expected to tip for almost everything. And Comstock’s letters to Handy bemoaned the way that Vanderbilt outmatched them in everything from pricing to renting office space to distributing handbills. Vanderbilt has several agents in Boston making great efforts to obtain freight and passengers,” he wrote. “The New Haven’s passengers and freight increases daily,” he noted on another occasion. “We are losing some of our regular freight customers.“Vanderbilt reached an agreement with the Boston & Providence Railroad—the erstwhile ally of the Navigation Company—that gave him a 25 percent rebate on freight charges. He put the Cleopatra on the line, which became very popular. (“She proves to be very fast,” Comstock admitted.) He even hired a lobbyist to petition Rhode Island’s legislature to stop the Navigation Company from having exclusive rights to its dock. “V is determined to put us to as much trouble and expense as possible,” Comstock said. “There is a great disposition here [in Providence] to assist him.”
As the spring of 1842 came and went, Palmer verged on a breakdown under the pressure. “His great wealth & tact in the management of steamboats renders him the most formidable opponent that could come in opposition,” he moaned on March 6. A few weeks later he whimpered, “Vanderbilt’s boat (the New Haven) lessens our receipts nearly one half. We are barely paying expenses.” In June, he wailed, “Vanderbilt is pushing his opposition against us with great vigor, & as you must have perceived by our weekly returns is ruining our business.” McNeill put it more graphically. Vanderbilt, he warned, “is gnawing at our very vitals.”
到1842年鸦片战争的时候，老范48岁了。老范也是经营高手，不断的降低运营成本，形成自己的竞争优势，居然能节约50%的燃料费用。然后通过价格竞争让对手出局。
As early as 1819, Chief Justice John Marshall had expounded on the corporation as “an artificial being, invisible, intangible,” but even corporate officials had difficulty with such abstract thinking. They used “company” as a plural noun, as in, “The company are in renewed trouble for their floating debts.” They saw the corporation as a gathering of individuals, as a kind of partnership—which it usually was, since few were very large or had widely traded stock. They placed great emphasis on the “par value” of stock, usually set at $100 per share. This represented the original investment in a company; it was expected that the total value of all its shares would equal the cost of the physical capital—land, buildings, machinery, livestock. A stock certificate might be a slip of paper, but it was thought to represent something real, much as paper currency represented cold, hard gold that could be retrieved on demand from a bank’s vault. With this physical, tangible basis for the price of stock, most investors did not buy in hopes that values would consistently rise, as they would in later centuries; that would have made no sense, since share prices ultimately rested on what it had cost to physically create the company, not how much it earned. They looked instead to a return on that cost in the form of dividends—often referred to as “interest on capital.” Share prices fluctuated, of course, but the most important factor driving them was the size and regularity of dividends. A price over par—above $100—was a premium paid for the certainty of a reliable return. A price below implied risk, uncertainty, even a dread conviction that dividends would never come.
The Commodore added, “Van, I have got eleven millions invested better than any eleven millions in the United States. It is worth twenty-five percent a year without any risk.” Given the size of Vanderbilt’s business operations, the $11 million figure rang true. It would have made him one of a half-dozen or so of the richest men in America; only William B. Astor and very few others could boast notably larger estates. The risk-free rate of return he cited was clearly hyperbole, but his point was clear: he had taken great care to put his affairs in order.
200年前的股份公司，股票价格基本就是净资产，主要功能是提供分红，定价方式是分红收益的稳定性，每股100美元，股价也不太波动，和债券类似，但提供了浮动的收益率。25%的现金收益率相当惊人了，那个时代的股票主要是赚股息。
It is important to remember that the corporation originated in mercantilism. Legal historian Morton J. Horwitz describes it as “an association between state and private interests for public purposes.” (The mercantilist character of early corporations led Adam Smith to denounce them as “a sort of enlarged monopolies.”) Over time it changed character until, Horwitz writes, “the corporate form had developed into a convenient legal device for limiting risks and promoting continuity in the pursuit of private advantage.” Eventually it became just another way of organizing a business.
But not yet. In 1848, the corporation was still emerging out of a political conflict over the best way to create commercial facilities for the public good (namely banks and transportation infrastructure—turnpikes, canals, and railroads). Whigs had favored direct government action, from the Bank of the United States to state-owned railroads such as the Michigan Central, or else public-private partnerships, as in the Camden & Amboy Railroad. Jacksonians had wanted to limit government, fearing that “the money power” would capture it to enhance the advantages of the wealthy over their fellow citizens; like Adam Smith, they viewed corporations with a jealous eye. The Panic of 1837 had proved decisive in resolving this debate. In its wake, canals and railroads had failed, discrediting state-owned “internal improvements.” But the need for such public works remained. And so, for all the Jacksonian dread of “stockjobbers,” the task of building railroads and other large projects fell to privately funded business corporations. That created a paradox: the nation’s public works, the carriers of commerce and means of travel, were owned by private parties, who operated them for personal gain.15 Because of this, Vanderbilt’s position as a corporate executive gave him[…]”
股份公司的缘起是重商主义，即政府通过公司来实现公共利益。公司被定义为国家和私人之间为实现公共目的创办的组织。但公司也在不断进化，还收到政治的影响。辉格党倾向国有企业来办事，所谓国家资本主义，民主党的杰克逊们喜欢小政府，私营企业。1837年的危机解决了这个问题，政府主办的铁路和运河工程失败了，民办铁路成为必然选择。也创造了一个悖论：公共工程却由私人企业来拥有。老范也因此虽然是民营企业家，却代表着公共利益。
ON AUGUST 26, DAVID WHITE signed a contract with the Nicaraguan government. It gave the exclusive right to build a canal to Vanderbilt’s American Atlantic & Pacific Ship Canal Company in return for $10,000 a year, 20 percent of the annual profits, and a stake in the business. “It will also be observed that the grant is not only for a canal, but for a rail or carriage road,” Ephraim Squier wrote to Clayton, “a provision which will enable the company to open a route at once across this isthmus, more rapid, easier, cheaper, safer, and more pleasant, than that by Panama. In distance, this route will save 300 miles on the Atlantic and upwards of 800 on the Pacific.
老范获得了尼加拉瓜运河的建设权，还包括陆地的铁路和公路。快两个世纪后，王靖在国内讲起了绕过巴拿马运河的同样故事。
The creation of Accessory Transit as a separate corporation gave it access to the power of the stock market to gather capital through sales of bonds, issues of new stock, or calls for additional payments from the shareholders. The Commodore’s sidewheelers now sailed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, packed with passengers attracted from the Panama route by lower fares. Vanderbilt earned vast sums from his ships, and as agent of Accessory Transit he kept 20 percent of each $35 ticket for the Nicaragua crossing. The success of Vanderbilt’s Nicaragua venture had national consequences. Simply put, he helped transform a rush for gold into the lasting establishment of American civilization on the Pacific. By steeply reducing fares and offering faster service, Vanderbilt sped up the flow of migrants to the West and gold to the East, where it had a significant impact on the economy. And he did it not only without a federal subsidy, but in competition with the subsidized line. Thanks in large part to reduced transportation costs, San Francisco matured from a dust-blown, mud-lined tent camp with gambling saloons into a brick-walled, warehouse-filled commercial center with gambling saloons.
老范创办的转运公司按独立实体经营，和他的船运公司按20%分账。这个转运公司还间接帮助了旧金山的淘金热，带来了旧金山的大发展。
Then a strange thing happened. Four days later, on September 18, the Times reported that the “Vanderbilt” party were now buying Transit stock, and that White and his friends were selling. “It is a frisky game of late,” the financial writer commented. On closer inspection, the turnaround appears less mysterious than brilliant. Vanderbilt used his “bear” campaign to pry shares out of the hands of White and his friends, and gain control of the company. How could selling lead to owning more? Most stocks, especially those in a “fancy” company like Accessory Transit (a volatile one that attracted speculators, who bought and sold rapidly), were bought “on margin.” A broker would lend the purchase money to his client, who merely put up a margin—an amount sufficient to protect the broker against loss if the price fell. Such stocks were, to use the technical term, “hypothecated.” When prices fell, the broker could either ask for a bigger margin from the client or sell the stock immediately to avoid a loss. The faster the price dropped, the more likely brokers were to dump hypothecated stocks, because they had less time to get more money from their clients. That drove the price down “urther, and eventually shook loose all the stock held on margin. This was the secret behind Vanderbilt’s bear attack on the Transit Company. Even before the end of August, the New York Tribune observed that the stock “has sunk so low that the margins on a large amount of hypothecated stock have been used up and this stock has also come upon the market.” By September 18, the price fell far enough that Robinson stopped selling and began to buy, on his own behalf as well as that of Vanderbilt, his family, and a new ally, Charles Morgan.
这个操作今天依然有。
In the end, the Commodore got all that he wanted. He had waged his wars on multiple fronts, under difficult conditions, against wily opponents, and won them all. He had battled the U.S. Mail and Pacific Mail Steamship companies, and made a great deal of money doing it. “The nett [sic] profits of his line of boats for the past season are figured up to $1,150,000,” the New York Times reported at the end of 1852. (Profits for the entire year, when added to those for 1851, must have been far more than that amount.) Then he had sold his ships on his terms, and at his price—indeed, for more than his initial price. His stock market campaigns had added enormously to his fortune. And he and his allies seized control of the Accessory Transit Company from the detested White (though that remained to be formalized). For the public the picture was far more ambivalent. On one hand, Vanderbilt wrought much good for his fellow citizens. Even though his canal scheme failed, he had created a new path of commerce and travel to California, one of great practical and strategic value to the United States. Falling costs and increasing speeds helped lift San Francisco from a trading outpost to a thriving metropolis—firmly rooting the republic on the Pacific—and improved the flow of gold to New York, pumping money into the national economy. Vanderbilt seemed to vindicate Jacksonian philosophy as he successfully competed against a government-subsidized line. He also revealed the beneficial role of the stock market by mobilizing capital to develop this critical new route. On the other hand, his battle against White demonstrated all too clearly the sometimes unhappy consequences of mixing private and public interests in a large enterprise. Travelers, merchants, and specie shippers fell victim to his vindictiveness as he disrupted the Nicaragua line to destroy its stock price; small investors fell victim to his bear campaign against White.
1852年，老爷子已经58岁了，玩逼空这么厉害。也经历了一次合伙人内斗。
He did not back out. Vanderbilt endorsed the Erie’s paper—that is, he accepted ultimate responsibility for its repayment of a six-month loan—to the sum of $400,000. For collateral, he took a mortgage on the entire rolling stock, all 180 locomotives and 2,975 cars. Drew endorsed notes for $200,000 (later even more) and took a mortgage on everything that was left. If the Erie didn’t pay, it would become the personal property of Vanderbilt and Drew.”
这就是企业家精神。危机面前，不惜用个人资产来抗。
What is most remarkable about this letter is its complete consistency with his previous public pronouncements, going back to the early 1830s. For all the apparent contradictions in his behavior, he envisioned his own career—his mission—in terms of a coherent philosophy: Jacksonian laissez-faire. Though the day was approaching when laissez-faire would be the conservative philosophy of a wealthy establishment, at this moment it lay on the populist—even radical—side of the spectrum. Vanderbilt had come of age in a society in which government intervention in the economy was seen as assistance for the elite. Even now, two decades after Jackson’s day, the beliefs of that president pulsed through American politics, equating egalitarianism with individual enterprise and competition in a way that would make little sense to Americans of later centuries, after both government and the economy had grown larger and more intricate.
老范的核心原则就是杰克逊的自由主义。
Vanderbilt faced the gravest crisis of his life to date. No catastrophe—not the great fires of 1835 or 1845, not the Panic of 1837, not the Schuyler fraud—had been so sudden, so deliberate, so thoroughly beyond his control. And yet, he did not sell out. What distinguished him in the moment of crisis was his self-command; characteristically, he prepared a counterattack on multiple fronts. He began with a trip to Washington. He met with Secretary of State Marcy and urged the administration to intervene in Nicaragua to “sustain the rights of American citizens.” He wrote a letter to Marcy for public consumption, refuting Walker’s pretext, taken from Randolph, for annulling the Accessory Transit charter. He sent a similar letter to Senator John M. Clayton, the former secretary of state, who took to the Senate floor to denounce Walker and his high-handed acts. Despite Vanderbilt’s personal lobbying, the administration chose to do nothing. In some respects, its inaction is difficult to understand. This was a national crisis: a private American citizen had seized control of a foreign country, attacked a major corporation, and temporarily shut down a strategically vital link between the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States. But the cabinet was frozen by its divisions.
1856年，已经60多岁的老范经历了人生最大的危机。尼加拉瓜被占领，转运公司也被废除特许经营。但他依然没有气馁，也没有跑路，而是站出来对抗、甚至亲自去游说。
The hidden carrot and very visible stick worked. The board refused to accept his resignation; instead, it appointed a committee to settle with him—and secure his aid in rescuing the road. A decade later, Vanderbilt recalled how president Allan Campbell told him that the line would go bankrupt; with its assets sold off, his claim might be paid at last. “No,” he replied, “I will help you out and lend you what money you want, and am willing to do anything else than that. There will be a time, before a great many years, when this road’s whole property will be worth par and it will be a stigma upon the man who will take this course [of bankrupting the company], and I won’t take it.” How intricately his financial calculations interwove with his sense of honor: he foresaw a great future for the benighted railroad, a time when its stock would rise on the exchange to its par value; he was willing to let the situation mature until he could profit from its strengths. Yet he also wanted the credit—and resulting social prestige—for rescuing an enterprise so closely identified with the ambitions of New York’s elite. Daniel Drew said he would join Vanderbilt in endorsing the railroad’s notes to see it through the crisis. “We will do it for two and a half percent [commission],” Drew said. “Mr. Drew,” the Commodore loftily replied, “I won’t do it for two and a half percent! I will do it with you for one-half percent.” Drew agreed. As Vanderbilt recalled, the railroad “made the bargain, and they drew up, and drew up, and kept drawing and coming with things to sign—notes, if you please, and acceptances—until we got some [seven] hundred thousand dollars.
老范拯救哈莱姆铁路的经典故事，只有他能看到铁路的伟大未来，最重要的企业家洞察力。他也并不贪婪，主动要求把佣金降低到市场的20%。
Scarcely had this mayhem died away than the nation fell into the greatest financial crisis in twenty years—the Panic of 1857. In retrospect, the warnings of a collapse look all too clear. There was railroad overexpansion: of the twenty thousand miles of line built in the 1850s (tripling the total length of track), 2,500 were constructed in 1857 alone. There was the end of the Crimean War: Russian wheat now flooded the international market, hurting American exports. There was France’s need for money: French banks borrowed from those in England, which raised English interest rates, which led British investors to sell off their American securities and invest at home, which undercut stock prices in the United States. And there was the heady effect of nearly nine years of California gold, which had fed speculation and inflated credit. Since the start of the gold rush, the number of banks in America had doubled, to more than 1,500. The monetary expansion reached a peak in early August. “And then there came on a sharp money market,” Vanderbilt recalled, “and everything broke down.
The first was a year of transformation, the second of crisis. In 1864, at the age of seventy, Vanderbilt abandoned his lifelong career in shipping as he amassed a railroad realm. Nine years later, he faced the Panic of 1873, an economic cataclysm that forced him to call up all his aged strength and ingenuity to protect what he had built. How he handled these two moments defined his legacy. In the end, he would not only build an empire, he would found a dynasty And his family would never be whole again.
64岁的老范遇上了1857年的经济危机，这次是铁路泡沫的破裂和加州淘金热催生的信贷高峰，市场大跌，银行破产。70岁时他彻底退出了航运。79岁的老范又遇上了1873年的大危机。可见对于企业家来说，危机其实是常态了。虽然十年或二十年一遇，但毕竟一次就是生死，实际就是常态了。过不了危机的坎就会死在当场。这点要铭记。
The limited government inherited by Lincoln’s administration lacked the financing, the manpower, even the organizational capacity to undertake a major war. The federal budget for 1860 had amounted to just $63 million. (The annual figure would grow to more than $1 billion by the end of the war.) Only sixteen thousand men filled the regular army, and they were dispersed across the western frontier. The navy floated just forty-two ships, not all of them ready for service. Though the army boasted some highly professional quartermasters, they had never dealt with the demands now imposed on them; as James McPherson writes, “The War Department slumbered in ancient bureaucratic routine.” States and private citizens had to assume responsibilities ordinarily reserved for the national government.
小政府的问题就是战争状况下的动员能力差，林肯政府起初的战争不顺就是这个原因。
The Commodore went on, “I was introduced to Mr. Lincoln, to whom I was then personally a stranger.” Now approaching the age of sixty-eight, Vanderbilt experienced the rare sensation of meeting a much taller man. Lincoln asked if Vanderbilt could do anything to keep the enemy vessel from steaming out of Norfolk once more. “I replied to him,” the Commodore wrote, “that it was my opinion that if the steamship Vanderbilt was there properly manned, the Merrimac would not venture to come out; or if she did, that the chances were ten to one that the Vanderbilt would sink and destroy her.” Then the president asked his price. “I at once informed Mr. Lincoln that I was determined that I would not allow myself to do anything by which I could be ranked with the herd of thieves and vampires who were fattening off the Government by means of army contracts,” Vanderbilt recalled, “that I had no vessels to sell or bargains to make, except one.” He would give the Vanderbilt to the government on the condition that he, the Commodore, should control its preparations for battle. Lincoln replied, “I accept her.”
老范真是大家，非常有魄力。68岁了，他不愿意借助战争发国难财，直接把船捐献给国家了，只有一个要求：自己亲自负责战备工作。真是难得的家国情怀。
The uncertainty of war caused many across the country to withdraw deposits or return notes for gold, ultimately draining reserves in Manhattan. Then, too, Secretary Chase borrowed heavily in New York to finance the war. Following Jack-sonian treasury laws to the letter, Chase refused to open accounts with the banks; instead, he insisted that gold be carted from their vaults through the twisting streets of lower Manhattan to the federal subtreasury The specie lingered there, out of circulation, for weeks or even months before it was spent. As banks struggled with reduced reserves, the Union suffered the string of setbacks that marked the fall of 1861: the loss of Lexington, Missouri, in September; defeat at Ball’s Bluff, Virginia, in October; and McClellan’s long refusal to advance on Richmond. When the navy seized two Confederate diplomats at sea, on their way to London, it seemed that war with Britain might ensue. Banknote holders rushed to redeem their paper money for gold, which they hoarded; banks called in loans; stock prices fell, causing panicked selling, causing prices to fall faster, erasing their value as collateral for borrowers. In short, a panic ensued. The banks of New York had no choice but to do the unthinkable (indeed, the illegal under state law): by mutual agreement, they ceased to pay note holders and depositors in specie on December 30.
Congressman Spaulding found a solution. A banker in private life, he drafted a law to issue federal notes that could not be redeemed for specie. They would be legal tender, which meant that they had to be accepted as payment for any debt; only customs duties and interest on federal bonds would be paid in gold. Lincoln signed the Legal Tender Act on February 25, 1862, and the Treasury began to issue $150 million in “greenbacks,” as the new bills were nicknamed. (In July came $150 million more.)
The greenback started a massive reconstruction and expansion of the invisible architecture of the economy, institutionalizing New York’s existing centrality to the financial system. In 1863, the National Banking Act created a network of federally chartered banks, which were required to purchase federal bonds and to deposit their cash reserves with banks in reserve cities; banks in reserve cities had to deposit their own cash reserves with banks in New York. This sanctified in law the pyramiding of cash and credit in Manhattan that had occurred before the war, strengthening the mystic cord of money that stretched from the hearthstones of western farms to stockbrokers’ offices in Wall Street. The act also allowed such banks to issue national banknotes, which were redeemable in greenbacks, not gold.Since the Legal Tender Act did not eliminate the gold dollar, it created two currencies—both denominated as dollars. The supply and demand for each varied, so the value of the greenback fluctuated against the gold dollar.
战争之下大家提取存款、兑换黄金，居然把储备银行提空了，导致了新的金融危机。央行不得不放弃兑换黄金的承诺，也导致1862年不得不推出绿钞，绿钞不再允许被兑换为硬币，最大面额一度是1000美元的。绿钞也开启了一个全新的时代，让纽约成为金融体系的核心。绿钞和黄金美元同时存在，也是双轨制了。
Consolidations. The word seems quaint, an old-fashioned version of the eye-glazing phrase “mergers and acquisitions,” yet it was fraught with portentous meaning in the 1860s. Vanderbilt’s consolidation of one railroad company into another into another into an empire would mark a profound change in the nature of the corporation itself. As late as the Civil War, a strong sense lingered that corporations were public bodies, chartered to channel private capital toward public ends—specific, limited ends. Early business corporations even operated under time constraints. The Richmond Turnpike Company had expired on schedule, and even the New York & Harlem Railroad had had to renew its charter in 1859 before it lapsed. Most corporations had come into existence during the life-spans—indeed, the active careers—of their stockholders and managers, who did not necessarily imagine that their companies would outlast their own involvement in them. The Pacific Mail directors had tried to sell out to the Commodore in order to pay off the stockholders and shut down permanently.
Starting in 1863, Vanderbilt would progressively destroy the last vestiges of this long-held conception. Drawing on his extensive experience with the corporate form, he would strip it of its remaining public character as he finished the long process of converting it into a vehicle for private gain alone. His consolidations would submerge older railroad companies into a behemoth to serve the requirements of efficiency and profitability; in so doing, he also would drown the original public purpose of these companies’ charters, to serve specific localities over well-defined routes. Often these consolidations would prove highly beneficial for the public—though only incidentally because it was good business. And his takeovers would heighten the growing distinction between corporations and their flesh-and-blood shareholders and managers. He would separate companies from the individuals originally associated with them, transforming them into impersonal and permanent, or very long-lived, institutions.”
企业合并建立起了新王国。公司不再是为公共利益，可以成为私人牟利的工具了。1863年，老范这年70岁了。
Perhaps the most important element in his character—even more than his economic calculation—was pride. We know he prized his reputation (as shown by his letter to Governor Morgan, among many other examples) and cherished his status as a man of honor. Most of all, he took pride in his abilities. Competitive to the core, he had spent his life outdoing other men, whether sailing New York Bay or navigating the Nicaraguan rapids; fighting with his fists or waging rate wars; racing his steamboats or running his four-footed trotters; designing steamships or planning sprawling enterprises. Now he would show the world that he could revive the most necrotic of companies. “Here is a man,” the Commodore would remark in 1867, “who has taken a road when its stock was not worth ten dollars a share, and had not been for years. He has had a little pride; he said he would bring up that road, and make the stock valuable.
范老的成功源自其对声誉和信用的重视、强大的竞争意识、能够起死回生的管理能力。
A final enigma surrounds Vanderbilt’s intentions, now that he controlled the Harlem. He had turned sixty-nine on May 27, an age generally associated with retirement—or death—rather than beginnings. He himself had written of “this late day” in his life. Yet he showed every sign of embracing his new role as chief executive despite his insistence on a vice president to run daily affairs. Over the ensuing months he would correspond with everyone from the Harlem’s chief engineer to Edwin D. Stan-ton about everything from machine shops to individual locomotives.46 His long-term plans, on the other hand, remain shrouded. More than likely, he had little notion of the epic wars to come.
What Vanderbilt did was set general policies, as well as the overall tone of management. Any corporation has an internal culture shaped by the demands, directives, and expections that rain down from above. The Commodore created an atmosphere of efficiency, frugality and diligence, as well as swift retribution for dishonesty or sloth. As Lambert Wardell observed, “He thought every man could stand watching.” Even though he disclaimed any interest in practical management, he tellingly remarked, “Now and then I get hold of a point that I have to look to. Smooth matters they never say anything to me about.” Every employee knew he was watching.
69岁的老范控制了哈莱姆铁路，也算是再次创业了，老范的工作就是管理大师的典范，制定总方针。史诗般的战争即将开始。
“The railroads’ massive demand for capital for new construction, even for ordinary maintenance and operations, drove another, subtler revolution. The financial world had long been ruled by generalized merchant capitalists such as Vanderbilt himself, but the railroads’ appetite for money far outstripped the capacity of individuals to meet it. Financial institutions—investment banks—now aggregated and channeled the capital of American and foreign investors. The wartime nationalization of the U.S. financial structure, with the introduction of greenbacks and the national bank system, contributed to this development. The frenzy on Wall Street, so notable in Vanderbilt’s Harlem corners, centered almost entirely in railroads, which provided by far the largest number of securities actively traded on the exchanges. This, too, played a role in the institutionalization of the economy. The identification of corporations with individuals, already waning when the war began, virtually disappeared in the 1860s, heightening the abstraction of the economic world. On the Pennsylvania Railroad, this process had gone one step further. This trunk line was managed by a professional staff rather than leading stockholders, with an engineer as president (J. Edgar Thomson) and a powerful vice president (Thomas A. Scott) who had risen through the ranks. Vanderbilt understood these financial changes; in part, that is why he relied so heavily on a vice president of the Bank of New York, James Banker. But he also represented a glaring exception to these trends.
融资是企业家的核心能力，任何时代都是。不能光看业务能力和技术本身。
How do I make a profit? Vanderbilt would rhetorically ask in court in 1869. “I make it by a saving of the expenditures. If I cannot use the capital of that road for pretty nigh $2,000,000 per year better than anyone that has ever been in it, then I do not want to be in the road.” He would elaborate at length on this approach. “That has been my principle with steamships. I never had any advantage of anybody in running steamships; but if I could not run a steamship alongside another man and do it as well as he for twenty percent less than it cost him I would leave the ship.” His triumph in making the Harlem pay may well have been more satisfying to him than the award, on April 17, of the gold medal that Congress had authorized during the war.
降本增效就是核心的经营之道。
For his first magic trick, he took what was one and made it two. On March 30, 1867, the Hudson River shareholders (himself foremost among them) approved his plan to nearly double the stock by issuing new shares worth $6,963,900 at par value.7 Called a stock dividend, it was similar to a stock split, an operation that would become common in the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, it sparked outrage. Charles F. Adams Jr. typified the reaction of orthodox thinkers when he called the transaction an “astounding” act of “financial legerdemain.” It seemed to unhinge the value of stock from the world of the concrete and real. Even now, the economic mind shrank before abstractions. Stock that did not reflect construction costs was derided as “fictitious capital,” to use the formal term—or, more commonly, “watered stock,” which called up the image of livestock encouraged to gorge on water before weighing and sale at the market. By contrast, new stock was not seen as diluting share value if it reflected actual construction or additional real estate. This thinking explains the curious fact that bonds were often convertible into stock: if used to buy cars and engines, purchase land, or finance construction, then they represented an increase of real capital. Vanderbilt used this conventional wisdom to justify his stock dividend. He distributed the new shares to existing stockholders on a one-for-one basis, but required them to pay 54 percent of the par value (or $54 each).
资本运作的高手，拆股加配股。
On April 18, 1868, in the midst of the Erie War, Vanderbilt beckoned to a thirty-year-old businessman from Ohio, a pious, long-faced oil refiner with a pinched mouth named John D. Rockefeller. Perhaps no other example better demonstrates the symbiotic relationship between railroads and industry. In part, the demands of the railroads themselves invigorated production. They consumed huge amounts of pig iron and coal, for instance; production of those commodities more than doubled in the decade after the Civil War. When Andrew Carnegie left the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1865, he invested in an iron mill, a bridge-building concern, a sleeping-car company, and other businesses that fed his former employer’s voracious appetites—and helped turn Pittsburgh into a smoke-shrouded manufacturing center.3 In addition, the railroads’ craving for freight led them to radically cut rates, which encouraged new industries by lowering shipping costs. When petroleum took off in the 1860s, new lines sprang into existence to serve remote wellheads; trains clacked into the mushrooming drilling towns bearing iron, lumber, foodstuffs, and other supplies, and chuffed out hauling barrels of oil. Cleveland boomed with more than fifty refineries that clustered outside of town amid a forest of wooden tanks, pouring a waste product called gasoline into the Cuyahoga River, which caught fire regularly. The city began as a Lake Erie port, but now refiners could choose from the Pennsylvania, Erie or Lake Shore railways to move their product for export.
75岁的老范遇上了30岁的洛克菲勒开始合作。卡耐基也同时发展起来。汽油正作为废料被倒掉。
And reaching Chicago made all the difference. With a population soaring toward 300,000, this metropolis teemed with stinking stockyards, slaughterhouses, and factories. All this put it on the leading edge of changes in the economy. “Although Chicago lagged far behind Philadelphia and New York, the nation’s leading manufacturing centers, in investment and output,” notes historian Eric Foner, “a larger proportion of its labor force worked for firms with fifty or more employees.” It was big in the biggest new thing: bigness.”
芝加哥发展起来了，公司也走向另一个特征：巨大的规模。
Even with these great affairs—and expenses—weighing on him, Vanderbilt may have found the strength to pick up one of the most massive companies outside of the railroad industry: Western Union, the giant telegraph monopoly. On October 12, 1870, five men closely identified with the Commodore moved onto its board of directors: Horace Clark, Augustus Schell, James Banker, Daniel Torrance, and John Steward.Western Union was a classic target for a Vanderbilt takeover: it possessed immense strengths, but needed reform. “With a magnificent income and a constantly increasing business, they found it impossible to pay regular dividends, and the value of the stock had declined to about one third its par value,” an industry journal wrote. “The management of the company [will be] placed in the hands of new men.… It is intended to dispense with some of the sinecures… which have hitherto proved so lucrative to their holders.” As was the case in all of the Commodore’s takeovers, Clark and associates organized an executive committee and took radical steps to put Western Union’s finances in order. And yet, their presence on the board hardly proved that Vanderbilt took a personal stake in the company, at least at this time”
快八十岁的范老在商战之余还保留敏锐的商业嗅觉：拿下西联汇款。
When the Commodore returned from Saratoga, he suffered a terrible loss. In October, an epizootic struck New York’s forty thousand horses, afflicting them with disease. The New York Herald remarked on “the singular spectacle… of a great city almost at a standstill; of thousands of persons, male and female, young and old, unable to reach their homes after a day of toil except on foot.” Omnibuses, streetcars, carts, and drays sat in the streets, or “were dragged slowly around by horses more dead than alive.” On November 15, thinking the worst had passed, Vanderbilt drove out behind Mountain Boy. Soon afterward the steed fell sick. Worcester came around to the Commodore’s stables not much later, and Vanderbilt told him his finest horse was dead. He would rather have given a thousand shares of New York Central, he said sadly, than have that horse die. When Worcester later recounted this remark, William—knowing how much his father valued both money and the Central—could only say, “Whew!”
1872年的纽约瘟疫。
Vanderbilt is the only man who can come to our rescue and reestablish confidence,” a broker remarked that evening. “I hope from the bottom of my heart that he will come down tomorrow, as he did on the occasion of Black Friday.… At the present moment there is a similar fight going on to break Vanderbilt’s stocks—Lake Shore, New York Central, and Western Union.” The failure of Richard Schell, long associated with the Commodore, gave the downward plunge added momentum. Almost instantly, New York Central dropped from 99½ to 94¾, Harlem from 126½ to 125, Lake Shore from 90½ to 86, Western Union from 88½ to 78. And they kept falling. Two days later, they would hit 89, 85, 79½, and 55¼ respectively. An enormous percentage of Vanderbilt’s net worth evaporated. As of October 15, the New York Central’s market value would shrink from its pre-panic level by $19 million, the Lake Shore’s by $17.5 million, and Western Union’s by $16.5 million. The crisis soon found its center in the Union Trust Company, the financial agent of Vanderbilt’s railroads. Like other banks, it suffered a run—a sudden rush of depositors who demanded their money—which forced it to close its doors.”
The Panic of 1873 started one of the longest depressions in American history—sixty-five straight months of economic contraction. In the next year, half of America’s iron mills would close; by 1876, more than half of the railroads would go bankrupt. Unemployment, hunger, and homeless-ness blighted the nation. “In the winter of 1873–74, cities from Boston to Chicago witnessed massive demonstrations demanding that authorities ease the economic crisis,” Eric Foner writes. The irony is that the fall was far more severe because of the rapid rise of the previous decade. The expanding, increasingly efficient railroad network had created a truly national market. The fates of farmers, workers, merchants, and industrialists across the landscape were tied together as never before. New York had cast its financial net across the country, which meant that credit flowed to remote regions far more easily than before—but also that financial panics affected the entire nation. As Vanderbilt pointed out, railroad overbuilding was an underlying economic problem, and it was exacerbated by Wall Street’s craze for railway securities. When the bubble burst, the consequences were felt across the country with devastating suddenness and severity.
“But the Union Trust needed Vanderbilt. For all the trustees’ bluster, they knew as well as he did that bankrupting the Lake Shore would accelerate the economy’s decline and gain them little in return. In the end, only Vanderbilt could save them, and only they could save Vanderbilt. The Commodore saw his leverage. He applied all his force on that point, patiently negotiating as the weeks went by, waiting for the emotional tide of fear to subside. On October 24, he finally convinced the trustees to accept the railroad’s notes, maturing at three, six, and nine months, to settle the loan.
There was a catch: the trustees insisted that Vanderbilt himself be responsible for repayment. Even now, after decades of economic growth and increasing financial sophistication, this one man towered above Wall Street as America’s financial prince. For Vanderbilt, it was a test of his faith in his ability to save the Lake Shore. He agreed, putting up his personal Harlem shares as collateral for the railroad’s notes.”
范老被大家期待为成为1873年经济危机中的解药，虽然当时没有用，最终还是他出手了。他自己都深陷其中。银行再次遭遇挤兑危机。这次危机带来美国历史上最长的经济萧——65个月，5年之久。这次的危机这么持久，也受铁路网的影响，把危机传到了全国各地。经济的全球化真是把双刃剑啊。