Vanderbilt
..Among the many things to which he gave thought and care, none was more important to him than the work he hoped would be accomplished by the Vanderbilt University. Vanderbilt, towards the end of his life, was still lamenting his lack of education and his involvement in the war against the south through his mightiest ship "Vanderbilt" and wanted to redeem that by building something of value for the South. And Nahsville, TN became the beneficiary of this attempt at atonement to his former enemies. In the early days of his career, people always described him as "boorish, uncultured" even after he made it to riches and built his dynasty. But how did he get there in the first place? What kind of legacy did he leave behind?
Cornelius Vanderbilt started operating ships and later building them with a Jacksonian spirit that embodied 3 tenets: Laissez-faire( mind my own business), limited government intervention, and anti-monopilizing sentiment( let the market decide). His first achievement was in the famous supreme court case 'Gibbons v. Ogden' where he advocated free trade between states and unencumbered sail. Next, in a fortuitous turn of events, he turns to steamships, and caught the California gold rush craze, and became the preeminent enabler of transfer of goods between San fransisco and the rest of the nation, through his Nicaragua line, but it wasn't just luck, he used to say that if I can not provide better experience with cheaper costs, I'd rather go out of business; he was ruthless on cutting prices.
He doesn't stop, NYC becomes a major economic hub thanks to his steamships and dominance at sea and his visible hand in shaping wall street and incurring structural monetary seismic shifts in how society understood money by switching from gold coins to greenbacks backed by gold and then to legal tenders. Despite a lot of near death experiences fighting the wiles of the sea, and the loss of family memebers, he still soldiered on, and was now bracing himself and his ships to get involved in the civil war, where his Jacksonian ideals would be put to the test. It was time the government got stronger to fight the rebellion and, later, counter the weight of his capitalistic might. After the civil war ended, Vanderbilt turned to the lake shore line and thereafter to a series of consolidations of various transit line companies, Vanderbilt becomes the singular man to command the transit lines(and the sea) and thus centralize everything into one entity he owned and controled. The richest man in America had now been born, and with him the 'Corporation' concept had come to life. Business will never be the same: If he had been able to liquidate his $100 million estate to American purchasers at full market value (an impossible task, of course), he would have received about one-tenth of the total demand deposits at banks and 2.8 percent of the nation’s entire money supply. If he had taken possession of $1 out of every $38 circulating in the American economy. From a jacksonian to a monopolist, After conquering enemies of all kinds, Vanderbilt has transformed himself and America, thanks to the help of his in-laws mostly and his children and left behind a dynasty that brought about the gilded age and the extrvagance of the 19th century America.
I am left wondering about the role of fortuitous timing in Vanderbilt's life. Surely, a lot of people coulda taken advantage of these opportunities, but there seems to be a combination of timing and mammoth determination and street smarts that's needed to identify opportunities before anybody else and keep going non-stop. I also wonder How his death ended that spirit of building and expanding of his empire; his sons couldn't match his pace and ended up in courts fighting over his wealth and squandering most of it on fancy homes and stuff that Vanderbilt would scoff at. Is the great man theory valid, after all?