lumber at a rate of 350,000 board feet a minute.
Not to be outdone was J. P. Morgan, the lonely anti-Semite with a three-hundred-foot yacht and a taste for showy European art. Though he had a grotesquely mottled nose, Morgan could sniff a bargain. He had bought a controlling interest in the Northern Pacific during one of the periodic panics that plagued the railroads. Hill had also bought a big position. Looking to end all competition at the turn of the century, they merged with their chief rival, Harriman's Union Pacific. The new monopoly, the Northern Securities Company, controlled all rail traffic for one-fourth of the United States. Everyone from sheepherders in Nevada to drugstore merchants in small-town Minnesota had to go through the trust to make their living. Freight rates went up. Protests followed. The imperious Morgan now owned the country, critics claimed. "Whenever he doesn't like it," said William Jennings Bryan, the populist presidential candidate, "he can give it back to us."
Roosevelt too was incensed. The trusts had pushed him with double-fisted arrogance, which roused his scrappier instincts. Morgan thought he could strike a quick deal. "If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up," he said. But there would be nothing short of open war in the courts. The titans howled. E. H. Harriman warned a Roosevelt aide that the president could not stop them; the trusts would crush him. "He said that whenever it was necessary he could buy a sufficient number of senators and congressmen or state legislators to protect his interests," Roosevelt wrote a friend. "And when necessary, he could buy the judiciary."
At the same time, the Rockefeller family started shopping out west. William Rockefeller, brother of the Standard Oil founder, John D. Rockefeller, bought into the world's largest copper company, Anaconda, also known as the Snake, just down the road from Butte. This was the smelter and mining complex originally owned by Marcus Daly, the best known of the copper kings. The Irish miners, at least, loved Daly because he paid well and was one of them â a native of Ballyjamesduff in the Ulster county of Cavan. After he died in 1900, the world's biggest copper mine and smelter, along with two company towns, fell to Rockefeller's hands, and turned the ever-opportunistic Senator Clarkâonce Rockefeller's fierce rival â into his water carrier in Congress. The family already
controlled the nation's oil supply. Now William Rockefeller wanted to build a third rail line, the Milwaukee Road, from the Midwest to Puget Sound, a way to gain access to the riches being shipped in from Asia. But to get from the flatlands to the inland sea, the line would have to bore through the Bitterroot Mountains, the heart of the Coeur d'Alene reserve.
John Rockefeller was perhaps the richest American who ever lived. Morgan and Weyerhaeuser were not far behind, each with a net worth roughly equal to that of Bill Gates, the Microsoft cofounder, in contemporary dollars. Rockefeller had more than four times the wealth of Gates, his stake at just under $200 billion, when adjusted for inflation. As to Roosevelt's view of these men, he was rarely discreet. He called them "the most dangerous members of the criminal class, the malefactors of great wealth," in his best-known phrase, uttered during a sharp economic downturn. And he was more cutting when he really wanted to be dismissive.
"It tires me to talk to rich men," he said. "You expect a man of millions to be worth hearing, but as a rule, they don't know anything outside their own business." When Standard Oil donated $100,000 to Roosevelt's campaign, the president asked that it be returned. It was somewhat jarring, to say the least, that Roosevelt, from a wealthy New York family, and Pinchot, who had inherited a chateau with twenty-three fireplaces, had turned so vehemently against their class, envisioning the national forests as a way to "help the
Not to be outdone was J. P. Morgan, the lonely anti-Semite with a three-hundred-foot yacht and a taste for showy European art. Though he had a grotesquely mottled nose, Morgan could sniff a bargain. He had bought a controlling interest in the Northern Pacific during one of the periodic panics that plagued the railroads. Hill had also bought a big position. Looking to end all competition at the turn of the century, they merged with their chief rival, Harriman's Union Pacific. The new monopoly, the Northern Securities Company, controlled all rail traffic for one-fourth of the United States. Everyone from sheepherders in Nevada to drugstore merchants in small-town Minnesota had to go through the trust to make their living. Freight rates went up. Protests followed. The imperious Morgan now owned the country, critics claimed. "Whenever he doesn't like it," said William Jennings Bryan, the populist presidential candidate, "he can give it back to us."
Roosevelt too was incensed. The trusts had pushed him with double-fisted arrogance, which roused his scrappier instincts. Morgan thought he could strike a quick deal. "If we have done anything wrong, send your man to my man and they can fix it up," he said. But there would be nothing short of open war in the courts. The titans howled. E. H. Harriman warned a Roosevelt aide that the president could not stop them; the trusts would crush him. "He said that whenever it was necessary he could buy a sufficient number of senators and congressmen or state legislators to protect his interests," Roosevelt wrote a friend. "And when necessary, he could buy the judiciary."
At the same time, the Rockefeller family started shopping out west. William Rockefeller, brother of the Standard Oil founder, John D. Rockefeller, bought into the world's largest copper company, Anaconda, also known as the Snake, just down the road from Butte. This was the smelter and mining complex originally owned by Marcus Daly, the best known of the copper kings. The Irish miners, at least, loved Daly because he paid well and was one of them â a native of Ballyjamesduff in the Ulster county of Cavan. After he died in 1900, the world's biggest copper mine and smelter, along with two company towns, fell to Rockefeller's hands, and turned the ever-opportunistic Senator Clarkâonce Rockefeller's fierce rival â into his water carrier in Congress. The family already
controlled the nation's oil supply. Now William Rockefeller wanted to build a third rail line, the Milwaukee Road, from the Midwest to Puget Sound, a way to gain access to the riches being shipped in from Asia. But to get from the flatlands to the inland sea, the line would have to bore through the Bitterroot Mountains, the heart of the Coeur d'Alene reserve.
John Rockefeller was perhaps the richest American who ever lived. Morgan and Weyerhaeuser were not far behind, each with a net worth roughly equal to that of Bill Gates, the Microsoft cofounder, in contemporary dollars. Rockefeller had more than four times the wealth of Gates, his stake at just under $200 billion, when adjusted for inflation. As to Roosevelt's view of these men, he was rarely discreet. He called them "the most dangerous members of the criminal class, the malefactors of great wealth," in his best-known phrase, uttered during a sharp economic downturn. And he was more cutting when he really wanted to be dismissive.
"It tires me to talk to rich men," he said. "You expect a man of millions to be worth hearing, but as a rule, they don't know anything outside their own business." When Standard Oil donated $100,000 to Roosevelt's campaign, the president asked that it be returned. It was somewhat jarring, to say the least, that Roosevelt, from a wealthy New York family, and Pinchot, who had inherited a chateau with twenty-three fireplaces, had turned so vehemently against their class, envisioning the national forests as a way to "help the
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