America's Money Machine

4 PART I / THE ROOTS OF REFORM
An incident may be as revealing as a volume, just as a droplet serves
for the analysis of a blood stream. The break-up of the Harriman-Fish
entente in 1906 serves as an excellent introduction to a larger tale. Indeed
these two men and their affairs are inextricably a part of the larger
tale. For both are involved in the Roosevelt story and the Roosevelt-big
business antagonism. In fact, the Roosevelt ferocity toward big business
may have been influenced by happenings flowing from the Damon­
Pythias relationship of Harriman and Fish, the rupture of that relationship,
and its various consequences.
Edward H. Harriman and Stuyvesant Fish had been business acquaintances
for nearly thirty years. Harriman, son ofan Episcopalian rector, had
begun life in Wall Street as a stockbroker's clerk, and was rising in the
world as an investment banker. Stuyvesant Fish was the distinguishedlooking
son of a distinguished father* and protege of William Henry
Osborne, chief stockholder of the Illinois Central Railroad. Starting as a
clerk in the general office of the railroad, he became secretary to the
president the following year; after a turn at banking, he returned to his
first interest and in 1877 was elected a director. In 1881, the railroad was
having difficulties in selling its bonds following the assassination ofPresident
Garfield. Fish may have discussed this with Harriman. Harriman
undertook to find a market in Europe and admirably succeeded. For that
service he was elected to the railroad's board ofdirectors on Fish's nomination.
This was the beginning of an intimate business association. It
lasted for a quarter century before it was ruptured with reverberations
that shook the financial world.
Harriman was no novice in railway securities. He had married the
daughter of a railroad president and had gone on his honeymoon in a
special train provided by his father-in-law, with a locomotive painted with
the Harriman name. In thosedays ownership ofa railroad, however short
or long, was somewhat equivalent to owning one's private plane today
and every man of means had one or two. With his father-in-Iaw's help
Harriman purchased a small, run-down road ofthirty miles with strategic
possibilities in its Lake Ontario harbor. He rehabilitated it, and sold it to
the Pennsylvania System. Now he had begun to take an interest in the
Illinois Central, and after his election to the board in 1883 this was to
become his plaything and obsession. Fish meantime had become vicepresident,
and a little later was elected president.
The Illinois Central had the reputation of being a "Society" road
*Hamilton Fish, who had been Grant's Secretary of State.