He did his best to make himself indispensable; they let him operate the switchboard for the first halfhour when the telephone service was opened. Edison noticed his weekly reports on the electrical situation in England
and sent for him to be his personal secretary.
Samuel Insull landed in America on a raw March day in eighty-one. Immediately he was taken out to Menlo Park, shown about the little group of laboratories, saw the strings of electriclightbulbs shining at intervals across the snowy lots, all lit from the world’s first central electric station. Edison put him right to work and he wasn’t through till midnight. Next morning at six he was on the job; Edison had no use for any nonsense about hours or vacations. Insull worked from that time on until he was seventy without a break; no nonsense about hours or vacations. Electric power turned the ladder into an elevator.
Young Insull made himself indispensable to Edison and took more and more charge of Edison’s business 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 engineering, he said once in a speech, when he was sufficiently czar of Chicago to allow himself the luxury of plain speaking, has been largely concerned with engineering all I could out of the dollar.
He was a stiffly arrogant redfaced man with a close-cropped 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 northern Illinois. 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 Bill 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 Insull began to use the public’s money to spread his empire. His companies began to have open stockholders’ meetings, to ballyhoo service, the small investor could sit there all 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 sell stock, officeboys, linemen, trolleyconductors. 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 trust-busting, controlling monopoly, the public good) and raised Samuel Insull to the peak.
He was head of the Illinois State Council of Defense. 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 Insull did he was a traitor. Chicago damn well kept its mouth shut.
The Insull companies spread and merged put competitors out of business until Samuel Insull and his stooge brother Martin controlled through the leverage of holdingcompanies and directorates and blocks of minority stock
light and power, coalmines and tractioncompanies
in Illinois, Michigan, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, Maine, Kansas, Wisconsin, 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 dollar in Middle West Utilities controlled seventeen hundred and fifty dollars invested by the public in the subsidiary companies that actually did the work of producing electricity. With the delicate lever of a voting trust controlling the stock of the two top holdingcompanies he controlled a twelfth of the power output of America.)
Samuel Insull began to think he owned all that the way a man owns the roll of bills 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, whispered that this financial structure was unsound. Fingers itched to grasp the lever that so delicately moved this enormous power over lives,
superpower, Insull liked to call it.
A certain Cyrus S. Eaton of Cleveland, an ex-Baptistminister, was the David that brought down this Goliath. Whether it was so or not he made Insull believe that Wall Street was behind him.
He started buying stock in the three Chicago utilities. Insull in a panic for fear he’d lose his control went into the market to buy against him. Finally the Reverend Eaton let himself be bought out, shaking down the old man for a profit of twenty million dollars.
The stockmarket crash.
Paper values were slipping. Insull’s companies were intertwined in a tangle that no bookkeeper has ever been able to unravel.
The gas hissed out of the torn balloon. Insull threw away his imperial pride and went on his knees to the bankers.
The bankers had him where they wanted him. To save the face of the tottering czar he was made a receiver of his own concerns. But the old man couldn’t get out of his head the illusion that the money was all his. When it was discovered that he was using the stockholders’ funds to pay off his brothers’ brokerage accounts it was too thick even for a federal judge. Insull was forced to resign.
He held directorates in eightyfive companies, he was chairman of sixtyfive, president of eleven: it took him three hours to sign his resignations.
As a reward for his services to monopoly his companies chipped in on a pension of eighteen thousand a year. But the public was shouting for criminal prosecution. When the handouts stopped newspapers and politicians turned on him. Revolt against the money manipulators was in the air. Samuel Insull got the wind up and ran off to Canada with his wife.
Extradition proceedings. He fled to Paris. When the authorities began to close in on him there he slipped away to Italy, took a plane to Tirana, another to Saloniki and then the train to Athens. There the old fox went to earth. Money talked as sweetly in Athens as it had in Chicago in the old days.
The American ambassador tried to extradite him. Insull hired a chorus of Hellenic lawyers and politicos and sat drinking coffee in the lobby of the Grande Bretagne, while they proceeded to tie up the ambassador in a snarl of chicanery as complicated as the bookkeeping of his holdingcompanies. The successors of Demosthenes were delighted. The ancestral itch in many a Hellenic palm was temporarily assuaged. Samuel Insull settled down cozily in Athens, was stirred by the sight of the Parthenon, watched the goats feeding on the Pentelic slopes, visited the Areopagus, admired marble fragments ascribed to Phidias, talked with the local bankers about reorganizing the public utilities of Greece, was said to be promoting Macedonian lignite. He was the toast of the Athenians; Mme. Kouryoumdjouglou the vivacious wife of a Bagdad datemerchant devoted herself to his comfort. When the first effort at extradition failed, the old gentleman declared in the courtroom, as he struggled out from the embraces of his four lawyers: Greece is a small but great country.