U.S.A_ - John Dos Passos [530]
turned the ladder into an elevator.
Young Insul made himself indispensable to Edi-son and took more and more charge of Edison's busi-ness deals. He was tireless, ruthless, reliable as the tides, Edison used to say, and fiercely determined to rise.
In ninetytwo he induced Edison to send him to
Chicago and put him in as president of the Chicago
Edison Company. Now he was on his own. My engi- neering, he said once in a speech, when he was suffi-ciently czar of Chicago to al ow himself the luxury of plain speaking, has been largely concerned with engi- neering all I could out of the dollar. He was a stiffly arrogant redfaced man with a
closecropped mustache; he lived on Lake Shore Drive and was at the office at 7:10
every morning. It took him fifteen years to merge the five electrical companies into the Commonwealth Edison Company. Very early I discovered that the first essential, as in other public. utility business, was that it should be operated as a monopoly. When his power was firm in electricity he captured
gas, spread out into the surrounding townships in
-526-northern Il inois. When politicians got in his way, he bought them, when laborleaders got in his way he
bought them. Incredibly his power grew. He was
scornful of bankers, lawyers were his hired men. He put his own lawyer in as corporation counsel and
through him ran Chicago. When he found to his
amazement that there were men (even a couple of
young lawyers, Richberg and Ickes) in Chicago that
he couldn't buy, he decided he'd better put on a show for the public; Big Bil Thompson, the Builder:
punch King George in the nose,
the hunt for the treeclimbing fish,
the Chicago Opera.
It was too easy; the public had money, there was
one of them born every minute, with the founding of Middlewest Utilities in nineteen twelve Insul began to use the public's money to spread his empire. His companies began to have open stockholders' meetings, to bal yhoo service, the smal investor could sit there al day hearing the bigwigs talk. It's fun to be fooled. Companyunions hypnotized his employees; everybody
had to buy stock in his companies, employees had to go out and sel stock, officeboys, linemen, trol ey-conductors. Even Owen D. Young was afraid of him. My experience is that the greatest aid in the efficiency of labor is a long line of men waiting at the gate. War shut up the progressives (no more nonsense
about trustbusting, control ing monopoly, the public good) and raised Samuel Insul to the peak.
He was head of the Il inois State Council of De-fense. Now, he said delightedly, I can do anything I like. With it came the perpetual spotlight, the purple taste of empire. If anybody didn't like what Samuel
-527-Insul did he was a traitor. Chicago damn wel kept its mouth shut. The Insul companies spread and merged put com-petitors out of business until Samuel Instul and his stooge brother Martin control ed through the leverage of holdingcompanies and directorates and blocks of
minority stock
light and power, coalmines and tractioncompanies
in Il inois, Michigan, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Ar-kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Maine, Kansas, Wiscon-sin, Virginia, Ohio, North Carolina, Indiana, New York, New Jersey, Texas, in Canada, in Louisiana, in Georgia, in Florida and Alabama.
(It has been figured out that one dol ar in Middle
West Utilities control ed seventeen hundred and fifty dol ars invested by the public in the subsidiary com-panies that actual y did the work of producing elec-tricity. With the delicate lever of a voting trust con-trol ing the stock of the two top holdingcompanies he control ed a twelfth of the power output of America.) Samuel Insul began to think he owned al that
the way a man owns the rol of bil s in his back pocket. Always he'd been scornful of bankers. He owned
quite a few in Chicago. But the New York bankers
were laying for him; they felt he was a bounder, whis-pered that this financial structure was unsound. Fin-gers itched to grasp the lever that so delicately moved this enormous power over lives,
superpower, Insul liked to cal it.