PDF The First Tycoon The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt TJ Stiles 9781400031740 Books
PDF The First Tycoon The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt TJ Stiles 9781400031740 Books
Download As PDF : The First Tycoon The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt TJ Stiles 9781400031740 Books
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
In this groundbreaking biography, T.J. Stiles tells the dramatic story of Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt, the combative man and American icon who, through his genius and force of will, did more than perhaps any other individual to create modern capitalism. Meticulously researched and elegantly written, The First Tycoon describes an improbable life, from Vanderbilt’s humble birth during the presidency of George Washington to his death as one of the richest men in American history. In between we see how the Commodore helped to launch the transportation revolution, propel the Gold Rush, reshape Manhattan, and invent the modern corporation. Epic in its scope and success, the life of Vanderbilt is also the story of the rise of America itself.
PDF The First Tycoon The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt TJ Stiles 9781400031740 Books
"Yes, he was the first tycoon, but what's more important is that this is a story about a man who started with nothing and built his wealth with very hard work. This is the story of early America, which is made up of people from other countries who came to this country to make a life in the new world. Vanderbilt's life started with very little education - he had dropped out of school at an early age. Yet his thinking process throughout his life is equivalent to what we would expect from someone with an MBA. He used common sense and long-term thinking whenever he made decisions. What did it cost him to make his millions? Mostly his family paid for his success. He worked constantly. But he figured out how to come out ahead of his competitors. He even figured out how to get across Central America to reach the Pacific Ocean from the Atlantic without going around South America. He realized that this shortcut would allow him to get items to California so much quicker; definitely quicker than going across country, which could also be quite dangerous. This biography does an excellent job of describing how he built his success on boats and ships and finished with railroads. It also does an excellent job of describing how he related to other people, including his family members. He wasn't necessarily well liked, but when you finish reading the book, you have to have some respect for the man and his methods and how he built an empire from absolutely nothing. It's a very long book, but every page had so much to say and well worth all the words used to tell the story. I've always thought of the Vanderbilt's through the Biltmore Mansion in Asheville, NC, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, but this was only part of the end of his life - there was so much more to the man."
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The First Tycoon The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt TJ Stiles 9781400031740 Books Reviews :
The First Tycoon The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt TJ Stiles 9781400031740 Books Reviews
- This impressive biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt is more than a biography. The reader can trace the development of American economic history from 1800-1875 through the life of Vanderbilt. Hamilton wanted government directly involved in the nation’s economy. From Jefferson up to the Civil War, the strong trend was to remove the federal government from the economy and open the door to individual freedom to innovate and compete. This allowed Vanderbilt, probably one of the most resourceful and clever capitalist entrepreneurs who has ever lived, the freedom to start with a Staten Island ferry that would eventually lead to one of the most massive accumulations of personal wealth and control of capital enterprises of all time. Ironically, the freedom that the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians wanted led to the massive control of the economy not by the government but by incredibly wealthy individuals and corporations.
Stiles’ biography is an enormously detailed book. It becomes increasingly technical in the economic sense as Vanderbilt moves from steamboats (and his fascinating adventures in Nicaragua) to railroads. Stiles should get enormous credit not only for his superb research, much better than earlier biographers of Vanderbilt, but also for his objectivity about the man and his ability to make as clear as possible to the average reader the often complex financial issues of Vanderbilt’s life. It is easy to see why this book won awards. Stiles not only gives us a man’s life (both personal life and business life) but how the American economic system developed in the 19th century.
Stiles is also a smooth writer. Chapters are divided into reasonable chunks separated by double spacing and the transitions and paragraph structures throughout the book are fluent and easy to follow. If I have any complaint (and it is a small one), it is that many many times Stiles ends these chapter subdivisions with either a cliffhanger sentence or some other “catch†line for the sake of dramatic continuity. This is unnecessary given the overall power of the book and Vanderbilt’s life. Except for that quibble, the book is a biographical tour de force that showed me not just the life of a brilliant, often cold, but complex man but also how the economic history of America as we know it today originated. - Yes, he was the first tycoon, but what's more important is that this is a story about a man who started with nothing and built his wealth with very hard work. This is the story of early America, which is made up of people from other countries who came to this country to make a life in the new world. Vanderbilt's life started with very little education - he had dropped out of school at an early age. Yet his thinking process throughout his life is equivalent to what we would expect from someone with an MBA. He used common sense and long-term thinking whenever he made decisions. What did it cost him to make his millions? Mostly his family paid for his success. He worked constantly. But he figured out how to come out ahead of his competitors. He even figured out how to get across Central America to reach the Pacific Ocean from the Atlantic without going around South America. He realized that this shortcut would allow him to get items to California so much quicker; definitely quicker than going across country, which could also be quite dangerous. This biography does an excellent job of describing how he built his success on boats and ships and finished with railroads. It also does an excellent job of describing how he related to other people, including his family members. He wasn't necessarily well liked, but when you finish reading the book, you have to have some respect for the man and his methods and how he built an empire from absolutely nothing. It's a very long book, but every page had so much to say and well worth all the words used to tell the story. I've always thought of the Vanderbilt's through the Biltmore Mansion in Asheville, NC, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, but this was only part of the end of his life - there was so much more to the man.
- Winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction
He was the original “robber baron.†Other familiar names associated with the nineteenth century — John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan — were young men in the early days of their careers when he was at the peak of his fame. Following the Civil War, he became the richest person in American history, and to this day remains the second-richest, bested only by Rockefeller. (Yes, richer by far than Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, insofar as such things can be determined.) More importantly, he was one of the original architects of the modern corporation, “consolidating†one regional railroad into another to form one of the country’s first massive, impersonal corporations. And he singlehandedly restored order and stabilized the US economy in the midst of one of the most severe financial panics in our history.
A life spanning 18 presidencies
This man, Cornelius Vanderbilt, is the subject of T. J. Stiles’ magnificent biography. Researched in great depth, written with verve, and scrupulously balanced, The Last Tycoon rejects the one-dimensional portrait of Vanderbilt as an illiterate, uncouth tyrant, restoring him to the complex, contradictory, brilliant, flesh-and-blood person he really was while correcting significant errors in previous histories of mid nineteenth century America.
Born in the second year of George Washington’s presidency, “Commodore†Vanderbilt witnessed the passage of 83 years, outliving not just nearly all his contemporaries but several of his children as well. His life spanned the administrations of the nation’s first 18 presidents but (in my judgment, not Stiles’) proved more consequential than all but four of them (Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln). In several ways, the Commodore (as he was known through the last half of his life) had far-reaching impact on the growing nation pioneering the efficient, low-cost passage to California in the wake of the Gold Rush, thus helping knit the country together, accelerate Western population growth, and shift tons of gold from the West Coast to fuel economic development in the East; leading the development and rationalization of the railroad network that heightened New York’s preeminence as the country’s financial center and biggest port; and breaking new ground in the development of the entity known as the corporation.
1Cobbling together the modern corporation
In hindsight, it seems to me, it was Vanderbilt’s groundbreaking work in piecing together his railroad empire that has left the biggest imprint on our times. Stiles painstakingly relates how the Commodore’s patient and protracted campaign eventually created the massive New York Central Railroad, one of the first of the huge corporations that soon came to dominate American life. (The other was the Pennsylvania Railroad, with which Vanderbilt alternately collaborated and competed.)
As Stiles makes clear, it’s difficult for us today, living in a world awash in corporations, to understand that the term “corporation†bore an entirely different meaning for much of the nineteenth century.
Originally, the corporation was a creature of the state, chartered for a specified number of years to advance the public interest in a particular way — building a canal, for example. The time limits fell by the wayside as the nineteenth century proceeded, but state-chartered corporations otherwise looked much the same in 1870 as they had in 1810 for example, a small group of wealthy investors would pool their money to build a railroad from one town to the next, seek a state charter, hire the dozens or even hundreds of employees they needed, then operate the business for as long as it proved profitable (which was not always the case!). As there weren’t that many wealthy investors with the necessary legislative connections, the number of corporations was strictly limited. The board and officers of any corporation could be easily identified, and it was they who personally managed the company. Capitalization was limited, usually no more than a few million dollars at most.
Vanderbilt’s legacy
1More than anyone else, Cornelius Vanderbilt changed all that. As the US economy grew from mid-century through the Civil War, Vanderbilt shifted his efforts from the steamboat business he had dominated (meriting the honorific “Commodoreâ€) into the fast-growing railroad industry. Just as steamboats had dominated transportation for decades, the railroads — the “high tech†of their day — soon far surpassed them. As Stiles notes, “The railroad sector surpassed all other industries combined, and individual railway corporations overshadowed any other kind of firm. Most manufacturing was still conducted in family-owned workshops and small mills; very few factories represented as much as $1 million of investment . . . Even the largest commercial banks rarely boasted a capitalization of more than $1 million. By contrast, at least ten railroads had a capitalization of $10 million or more even before the [civil] war began.†Small wonder that Vanderbilt, with his monumental ambition and ego, was drawn into the fray!
As the country’s population grew, fueled by increasing immigration, and the attractiveness of New York’s port became irresistible, “Western†(not Midwest) farmers and industrialists alike were demanding ever-great shipping capacity from West to East, and the Commodore responded by financing and running a series of small railroads that constituted strategic links along the way. His unsurpassed talent as a business strategist and financier enabled him to outsmart and outperform his competitors. The end result was the creation of a corporation that employed not dozens or hundreds but tens of thousands, encompassed thousands of miles of track across the Northeast and Midwest, and was capitalized in the tens of millions of dollars (the equivalent of billions today).
With a few exceptions — notably, Vanderbilt himself in his waning years — these behemoths could no longer be managed by amateurs. The modern corporation was born, with its insatiable need for salaried functionaries filling bureaucratic niches. Within a decade of Vanderbilt’s passing in 1877, the US Supreme Court enshrined the change in law by insisting that corporations are persons, entitled to all the rights embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment. The rush was then on to a world in which the corporation is king.
Anyone interested in US history — or, for that matter, anyone who loves biography — will find The Last Tycoon to be a superior reading experience. Three cheers for T. J. Stiles!
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