As a middle-aged steamboat magnate, he helped open an alternate Central American route to California’s gold rush. Supreme Court case that strengthened federal control of interstate commerce. Born while George Washington was president, he was still in his twenties when he defied another man’s monopoly over New York Harbor ferry rights and thus instigated a U.S. His fingerprints can seem to be everywhere on our history, said Richard M. The author’s mammoth new book sometimes “resembles a five-course meal at a three-star restaurant: It’s not designed for rapid digestion.” But after some 700 “arresting” pages of “fistfights, shipwrecks, and market manipulation,” I wanted to raise a toast to Vanderbilt and “everything the old rascal did for the U.S.” “Stiles has a gift for making readers admire unsavory characters,” said James Pressley in. To him, shares in a company were tools of broader battles, and the emerging stock market was itself an arena ripe for vast profit making.
Before Vanderbilt, business was primarily a pastime of the gentlemanly elite, and corporations were typically formed only to carry out public-works-like projects. Vanderbilt’s most transformative achievement was to create the “unseen architecture” of American capitalism, which in turn made the U.S. But the bullish and unschooled son of a New York farmer “may have left his most lasting mark in the invisible world,” says biographer T.J. Cornelius Vanderbilt lived a high-profile life: building a steamship empire, then the nation’s biggest railroad, and amassing a personal fortune equivalent to one in every nine dollars of total U.S.
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