The New Colossus

by Marshall Goldberg

  Nellie was dazzled that Gould knew so much about the situation.

  “She wrote a story for the Century about it,” she said, “but it was never published. And they won’t let me see the manuscript.”

  “Do you know what was in it?”

  “No. But whatever it was accelerated her death.”

  “Of course it did. Miss Lazarus was smart enough to deduce their plans,” he said admiringly. “Hilton and Corbin could brook no interference, even from someone as well-established as Miss Lazarus.”

  “Interference with what? Their plan is obvious, isn’t it? New York is crowded. People will begin moving out of the city, and Hilton and Corbin bought up all the land. Eventually it will be extremely valuable.”

  “But that will be years from now. You need to think bigger, Miss Bly. They could have purchased land anywhere on Long Island and created a residential area. It was Montauk Point they were after.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He struggled to contain his impatience that he had to spell it out to her as if she were a child. “Corbin has a monopoly on all train travel on Long Island.”

  “Yes—”

  “His trains go all the way to Brooklyn and Queens. He owns the ferries to take passengers to Manhattan. And I suspect before long, he will get the city to finance a bridge so his trains can go all the way into Manhattan as well. In effect, he will have a monopoly on all rail traffic from the north and east into New York.”

  “That’s worth a fortune.”

  “No, Miss Bly. That is worth merely a great deal of money. What they have in mind is a real fortune. All ships arriving from Europe now dock at Battery Park and unload around the wharf at the East River. Everyone and everything coming from Europe arrives there. More passengers and cargo go through that area than all the other harbors in the country combined.”

  “Yes. I know that—”

  “Hilton and Corbin want to have all ships from Europe land one hundred miles farther east, at Montauk Point. The passengers and cargo would then disembark and go aboard their trains, race across Long Island, and arrive in Manhattan a day or so earlier than they do currently. Or they might connect with the Pennsylvania or the Southern Railway or the Central Railroad of New Jersey, which they also own, without having to go into Manhattan at all. Europe and England are our major suppliers of goods and our major outlet for everything this country produces. Their plan would transform the nation’s commerce and spell the end of New York City as a major landing point.”

  “A million passengers a year arrive here!”

  “Two million. Not to mention the tonnage of cargo. Plus rents from merchants and ship owners, plus the ability to set monopoly prices and control workers’ wages. That is an enormous amount of revenue, by anyone’s standards.”

  Nellie struggled to grasp the full, astonishing extent of their plan.

  “It would be costly to build a harbor,” Gould went on, “and I wasn’t sure if they were prepared to spend all that capital, but now we know the answer. For the plan to work, they had to secure Montauk Point. That is the integral piece. Anything farther west would lessen their time advantage and pose a navigational hazard.”

  “Maria Pharaoh could have made a mess of things.”

  “By herself, no. No court would have taken her seriously. But with Emma Lazarus, that would be a different story. Hilton must have learned about the manuscript and managed to suppress it, through the work of Charles DeKay, I suspect—”

  It was remarkable how much he deduced.

  “—and once she returned from Europe, he could not have her interfering in the trial.”

  “When was the trial?”

  “December of last year. One month after she died.”

  Absolute control of the major arrival point from Europe. A monopoly on all rail traffic, for both passengers and cargo, to points north, west, and south of New York City. And total ownership of the surrounding land. The scope of the enterprise was almost beyond comprehension.

  “Can they be stopped?” she asked in trepidation.

  “I don’t see how.”

  “What about the railroad commission?” The previous year, amid great fanfare, Congress had enacted the Interstate Commerce Act, to put an end to monopolies in the railroad industry.

  Gould scoffed.

  “The president appoints the commission members. Thanks to this nonsense with the Murchison letter, that will be Harrison. He will choose exactly whom Hilton says. And if any commission members should exercise independence, Congress will be sure to rein them in. No, Miss Bly, I’m afraid no one is going to stop them.”

  “What about you?” she asked desperately.

  “Me? I’m an old man. My wife is not well, and my children make my life difficult. The truth is, if Hilton and Corbin approach me to buy the Manhattan Elevated, I would be inclined to sell it to them.”

  “But you can’t! You carry three million passengers a year!”

  “At present. But once they begin diverting commerce through Long Island, the Manhattan Elevated will not be worth very much. I might as well take what I can get for it now.”

  “But to let Judge Hilton get the best of you—”

  “This is business, Miss Bly. There is no room for emotions.”

  “Let me write the story first, Mr. Gould. Please. Mr. Pulitzer will publish it. Maybe that can stop them.”

  “As you wish, Miss Bly. But I assure you it will make no difference.”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Mayor Hugh J. Grant

  The article set off a firestorm.

  Pulitzer, of course, was only too glad to put Henry Hilton in a bad light. With the Sun, the Herald, and the other Republican newspapers making the Murchison letter the lead story in the run-up to the election, the World had the story of the two craven monopolists all to itself. “Railway Barons Out to Destroy NYC,” screamed one headline. “Port of New York Faces Shutdown,” proclaimed another. “Crime Pays: Profiting from Thievery” was the main editorial headline and recurrent theme.

  Mayor Hugh J. Grant, at thirty-two the youngest mayor in the history of New York City, demanded that the state government put a halt to the monopolists’ plans, but as a young Irish Catholic Democrat his power was limited, and no one outside New York City seemed to care. Richard Croker, the head of Tammany’s patronage system—the city’s 1,200 workers, entirely beholden to him, turned out for candidates or halted construction projects at his pleasure—implored the city’s businessmen, from whom he demanded “one-stop shopping” bribes, to decry the project at Montauk Harbor, but their entreaties had no effect. Even J.P. Morgan, who saw the future value of his vast real estate holdings dropping considerably with the shift of business away from the port of New York, got nowhere with Hilton and Corbin. When Morgan invited the two barons to a private meeting at his home, they tersely declined.

  The two magnates had anticipated a backlash once their plans were made public and employed considerable resources to elicit sympathetic statements of support. State Senator Philip A. Robinson from Syracuse, a failed businessman who had amassed a small fortune carrying water for Hilton at the state capital, said that “all of New York, and indeed all these United States, will benefit from the harbor at Montauk.” Assembly Speaker Thomas R. Shill, a nativist from Rochester, played to the anti-New York City bias rampant throughout the rural parts of the state by claiming that “the only ones complaining about the new system are the micks and guineas in New York City.” When Mayor Grant declared that “Hilton and Corbin not only set out to acquire a monopoly, but they accomplished it by stealing from the Indians,” Senator Robinson responded, “that is exactly the point. Hilton and Corbin have done the state a great service by ridding Long Island of unwanted savages.”

  Hilton and Corbin had planned well. The business press immediately lined up in favor of the new Montauk harbor. “State government,” proclaimed the New York Herald, the nation’s largest paper
outside the World, “has no business interfering in the wisdom of free enterprise.” “We welcome the new Montauk harbor,” declared the Sun, “as it will lessen the stranglehold of the unions on commerce.”

  At almost any other time, the Montauk Harbor story would have run for days and sparked a national debate, and the two robber barons would most likely have had to answer for the way they’d acquired the land and their plan to strangle Manhattan by siphoning off its life source upstream. But readers outside of New York City were focused on the presidential election, as the country itself was at a critical political juncture. President Cleveland had put in place a reformist agenda to shift power from the extremely rich (a census showed that 1 percent of the country’s population owned 25 percent of the wealth) to the middle class. Harrison and the Republicans were pushing back hard, exploiting every fear at their disposal, especially resentment of immigrants. The battle of the 1888 election was for the helm of the ship of state. Who would control the future: the wealthy and the powerful or the middle class and the powerless?

  In New York City, though, panic was setting in. Thousands of workers made their living on the docks unloading cargo or assisting passengers at this major port, busier than all the other ports in the country combined. Immigrants may have been forced to live in cramped, even squalid conditions, but there was almost always work, and they knew if they saved enough, they could improve their lot in life. If the main harbor shifted to Long Island, many of the wharf and ancillary jobs—the street vendors, the shopkeepers, the apartment owners—would disappear or go with them. The political power in the state would shift as well. For twenty years, Tammany Hall had controlled New York City and much of Albany. All of that would change when the state’s point of entry shifted one hundred miles east, and of course Hilton and Corbin would handpick the representatives from those new districts.

  Rather than allaying the public’s fears, Hilton and Corbin sought to exploit them. With great fanfare that included bands, performers, reporters, and photographers, they brought in tenant farmers from the Deep South to build the harbor and proudly showed off the makeshift housing where their families would stay (provided that the husbands agreed to work at subsistence wages indefinitely). They loudly promised not to hire any Irish, Italian, or Jewish workers to build the harbor, announcing that ethnics were most definitely not welcome on their property—or in America itself, for that matter. Most brazenly, and as Gould had predicted, they made an offer for his Manhattan Elevated, which would give them a monopoly on all elevated train transportation in New York’s five boroughs (all trains in the boroughs were elevated above the street), to match their near monopoly on all train transportation in and out of the city. They wanted to demonstrate that even Mephistopheles himself could not stand in their way, and to everyone’s amazement and heightened paranoia, they succeeded. The offer was just under $20 million—about half of what the elevated was worth. Gould asked for some of the payment to be in the form of stock in their company, but they refused. Hilton did not want Jay Gould riding the coattails of their success. As a fallback, Gould insisted on a cash transaction. Eager to wrap things up quickly and increase their momentum, Hilton and Corbin agreed on the spot, and Gould took their offer without further bargaining. The business press ridiculed the sale as total surrender on Gould’s part, with Hilton giving long, caustic interviews trumpeting his victory. At long last, someone had gotten the better of Jay Gould.

  Their power and superiority were only confirmed a few days later when Harrison defeated Cleveland in the presidential election. The two barons had poured a fortune into the Harrison campaign, and it had paid off. Although Cleveland won the popular vote, Harrison prevailed in the Electoral College 233–168, only the third time in U.S. history when the candidate receiving the most popular votes did not win the election. The Electoral College race, however, was far closer than the 233–168 margin indicated.

  Cleveland lost his home state of New York—the same New York that was about to be assaulted economically by Corbin and Hilton—by less than 1 percent of the total vote. Had he won New York’s twenty-nine electoral votes, Cleveland would have carried the Electoral College by 204–197. The Murchison letter that Hilton had shown Nellie did indeed determine the election, with the Irish of New York voting against their own economic interest out of a deep-seated hatred of the English. But Hilton and Corbin, leaving nothing to chance, did not rely entirely on the Murchison letter to secure a Harrison victory. In Indiana, voters were paid $15 if they voted Republican. In other states, they employed duplicate voting, voter intimidation, and nonresident balloting. The 1888 presidential election would go down as the most corrupt in the history of the United States.

  Hilton and Corbin got the result they wanted. With Harrison in the White House, the Republican majorities in both branches of Congress and on the Supreme Court, the federal government was no threat whatsoever to slow them down. Given their attendant stranglehold on politicians in Albany, they would be operating without any authorized restraint. Nothing stood in their way to achieving total commercial dominance.

  The re-election of Grover Cleveland, the former governor, had been the New York citizenry’s last hope. The day after Harrison’s victory, Mayor Grant in effect sued for peace and called for a meeting with the two barons, but they declined his overture, citing “prior obligations,” and did not propose an alternate date. The young Irish mayor, insulted and embarrassed, vowed to make life difficult for the two barons the moment he got the chance, but with Hilton and Corbin holding all the cards, including new ownership of Gould’s Manhattan Elevated, Grant’s threat was not taken seriously even by city Democrats.

  Hilton also used the opportunity to settle a personal score with Pulitzer. Two weeks after the election, one of his Congressmen-on-retainer, Senator H.W. Blair of New Hampshire, introduced the “Day of Rest Bill,” which would ban selling or delivering newspapers on Sunday, the World’s most profitable day.

  Nellie followed all these developments with dismay. She knew the kind of blackguards Hilton and Corbin were. The two of them were about to inflict a terrible blow to the city of New York and become phenomenally rich in the process.

  She sat with Alan Dale in a restaurant off Newspaper Row, having tea and a scone and reading about the mayor’s latest futile overtures to the two barons. The restaurant was limited to reporters, and Nellie was the only woman there. She drew cold stares from men at the bar and at nearby tables, but the hostility went no further; no one wanted to take on Dale’s sharp tongue in a direct confrontation. Besides, Nellie had been the one to break the story about Montauk Harbor, and though the men in the room didn’t like the idea of women reporters, she had earned some stripes with that one, they’d give her that.

  “I can’t believe they are actually getting away with this,” she said with chagrin. “Fraud, theft, murder …”

  “No one can stop them. It’s the way of the world, my dear.” Dale, as a native Englishman, was used to the upper classes operating with impunity.

  “We can stop them.”

  “You can’t bring them to trial. Or throw them in jail.”

  “No. But this is still a democracy. No one can survive the public’s deep anger.”

  Nellie knew she had a powerful tool at her disposal, a tool that was just coming into its own. Since the emergence of telegraphy, news stories could spread throughout the nation, even the world, in a matter of days if not hours. The public had an undeniable antipathy toward robber barons—the Interstate Commerce Act of 1887 had made it through a Congress with two Republican houses. Hilton and Corbin and the other railroad barons might run roughshod over the Act, but if there were enough outrageous stories of their corruption, enough infuriating examples brought before the public, the outrage would be so great that people simply would not stand for it anymore. She genuinely believed that. She had traveled enough and reported enough to know she wasn’t being naïve. Only twenty-five years before, the country had fought a devastating
Civil War—in which one out of every ten Americans had been in uniform, and 2 percent of the entire population had been killed—in order to preserve American institutions. If the people saw that those institutions had been taken over by greedy men whose wealth was already beyond imagination, they would rise up in a fury. She just knew it, she knew it in her bones. And she had the perfect vehicle for spreading that truth, the paper with the largest circulation in New York, the New York World.

  “Well, you haven’t much time,” noted a skeptical Dale. “The inauguration is in March. Construction on the harbor will begin the next day, I would guess, when Cleveland’s people can no longer make any mischief. After that, it will be too late.”

  “I agree. By that point, the two of them will be in a commanding position. We have three months.” Actually it was less than that, she thought to herself. The story would need to pick up steam before any government officials would feel forced to act.

  “How exactly do you plan to go about it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That was the problem. She had no concrete way to connect Hilton to Emma’s murder. She needed facts. Insinuation would not be enough, even for Pulitzer. He would have no hesitation publishing something scandalous about Hilton and making it the lead story in every paper he owned, but it would have to be irrefutable. Taking on two men who had stolen Indian lands and were threatening the economic well-being of New York City wasn’t enough, that was already clear. She would have to show they engineered the murder of a famous poet, a woman of grace and charity and prominence. And she only had three months to do it.