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In
these days the leading street railway tycoons in New York City were George
Law and Jacob Sharp. Building on his political momentum, Whitney teamed up
with Thomas F. Ryan, a stock broker with close ties to Tammany Hall, to
engineer Sharp’s downfall and reorganize New York’s street railways under
the umbrella of Metropolitan Traction, America’s first holding company.
Through
unscrupulous transactions, involving the acquisition of numerous decrepit
lines and unloading them at great profits on the parent corporation, whose
stock they aggressively expanded and promoted in Wall Street, this group of
men built outstanding personal fortunes and laid the basis of several of
America’s wealthiest dynasties. Acting as a group, which later also included
Anthony N. Brady, the street railway tycoons became leading shareholders in
the American Tobacco trust and later unsuccessfully tried to monopolize
automobile manufacturing, through the Selden patent.
If
the consolidation of street railways built America’s largest lasting
fortunes from public utilities, the application of gas and electricity to
street lighting and motive power, as well as the introduction of these new
forms of energy to private households, soon brought even larger
corporations. Whirling dervishes like Samuel Insull rose and crashed on the
wave of such pyramid structures as the Corporation Securities Company, while
Wall Street’s leading investment bankers and brokers made millions promoting
their stocks and bonds to the public.
Read more about the
utility tycoons of the Gilded Age in the following pages of
"A Classification of American Wealth" :
Utility Tycoons >
Index and Introduction :
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