No two were more the darlings of the steel age than John and Thane. They were for it and of it, lover and husband to it, remarkably possessing between them the qualities it demanded of men. No part of its mystery was unknown to them. They became miners and smelters of ore, bringers of coal, burners of coke, drawers of wire, rollers of rails, in a very large way. Their wealth in property increased alarmingly. One thing begat another so fast and new opportunities so unexpectedly appeared that their resources were chronically stretched to the utmost and they were continually in need of more capital. John was always buying something they couldn’t pay for,—an ore mountain perhaps, a ship to transport the ore down the Great Lakes, a steel plant somebody had blunderingly steered on the rocks. He was like a man on a tight rope juggling more glass balls than he can hold all at once. He has to keep them going in the air. He cannot stop. John never thought of stopping. It wasn’t that he wished to be rich; it wasn’t that he had a passion for power; he craved excitement. And there was plenty of it. The steel industry had frightful growing pains for which there was no diagnosis. The trouble was it grew by violent starts and then had fits of coma. The[293] profits were so great when there was any profit at all that the steel maker would pawn his hope of the everlasting to build more mills; and perhaps before they were finished the profit had vanished and his despair was as wild as his ecstasy. The time to buy steel plants was when the sky was visible at Pittsburgh; the time to sell them was when the smoke was so dense that the sun at midday resembled a pickled beet. But at one time no one had the money to buy anything with and at the other time nobody would sell.
These were conditions perfectly suited to the exercise of John’s reckless speculative genius. In the sloughs of despond he bought more property, as he had bought the Agnes plant, with his notes of hand and promises to pay. He seemed never so serene as when treading the edge of a financial precipice in a high wind with a swaying load on his back. People watched him with awe. He would do it once too often, they said, as each time he got back to safe ground again. Certainly he was a dangerous man to walk with. In an industry controlled by fatalists he was unique for daring. Yet back of his apparent passion for the gambling chance were saving qualities. He had keen, brooding vision and rare business sagacity. When he told a committee of United States Senators that with a tariff protection of six-tenths of a cent a pound he would make this country independent of the European steel wire makers (this was at the beginning),—when he said that nobody took him seriously. However, they gave him what he wanted. The price of wire was then twelve cents a pound and this[294] country was importing from Europe three-quarters of all it used. A few years later the tables were turned. This country was making more than half the steel wire used in the whole world, selling it heavily even in England, and the price was two cents a pound. So with all things of steel. So with steel rails. When the American steel industry got started at last foreign steel rails were being imported for American railways at $125 a ton. Ultimately American steel rails sold for $18 a ton in this country, in Europe, in Asia and Africa. The United States then had become an exporting nation selling the products of its skill to the four ends of the earth.
Business is warfare in time of peace. Hence its lure for combative men. Its goal is conquest. Let alone it would perhaps wreck itself or enslave the world. No matter. When it is ruthless, knowing no law but its own necessity, then it is magnificent.
Attila, king of the Huns, vowing no grass to grow where his horse had trod the enemy’s soil, is magnificent. We can see him in that light now that he is far away in history and not pursuing us.
Business as it was in the last quarter of the nineteenth century also is far away. Nothing like it can ever happen again. It was utterly lawless, free in its own elemental might, lustful and glamorous. The barbaric invasion that overturned Roman civilization was more obvious as a spectacle but no more extraordinary, no more unexpected, and perhaps as it shall turn out, no more significant, than America’s economic invasion of the world in the steel age. One stupendous[295] sequel already present is the economic, financial and political supremacy of the isolated American people in the affairs of this earth. What will come of that nobody knows.
The Breakspeares conceived it, imagined it, planned it; the Thanes tooled it. There was of course labor. But labor no more invents the tools that are the means to economic conquest than soldiers invent the weapons of war, and has generally less understanding of ends than soldiers have of the strategy.
The men controlling the steel industry came to be grouped in three main divisions. There was the original Pittsburgh group, under the leadership of a round head named Carmichael; it had founded itself in iron and then gone into steel. It was steady and powerful and had gained some influential support in Wall Street. There was the western group, always falling down and getting up again, very unstable, yet dangerous as competitors.
And thirdly was the Breakspeare group, extremely unpredictable, whose interests lay in every direction.
John naturally attracted men who loved risk and lived easily with danger. Slaymaker learned the attitude, not thoroughly, but sufficiently, and walked doggedly along. His goal was wealth for its own sake. Although John’s high adventures often threatened to involve all of them in colossal bankruptcy, yet this never quite happened, and each time it didn’t happen Slaymaker took a part of his profit and hid it away, never to be risked again. Jubal Awns, the lawyer, became superstitious about John and followed[296] him blindly. Besides these two, who had been in from the start, there were three others who would be called general partners. They not only were very large stockholders and directors in John’s companies; they joined their capital with his in new undertakings. One was Isaac Pick, a wordless man who conversed in gestures and disbelieved everything including the fact of his own existence. He had made a fortune in scrap iron and was brought into the group by S............