Henry Clay was thirty-five. He was well educated thanks to his mother’s gentlemen friends and clients who had staked him to excellent boarding schools in his youth. But the stints at school were as brief as his mother’s friendships, and he remained always the outsider — the day student at Choate, Phillips Andover, Exeter, Deerfield Academy, and St. Paul’s — brushing shoulders, fleetingly, with heirs to the great American fortunes that he hungered to possess himself.
At fifteen, Clay ran away from home and became a Pinkerton spy in the labor unions. At eighteen, in Chicago, he lied about his Pinkerton service and hired on as the first employee of the great detective of the age, Joseph Van Dorn. Van Dorn had recognized Clay’s extraordinary natural aptitude — his striking wit, his astonishing physical strength — and had held high hopes that his first apprentice would help him build his detective agency.
Van Dorn, a child of the Irish revolutions, which he had turned his back on when he saw them descend into criminality, had personally honed the boxing skills Henry Clay learned in school and trained him to fight with guns and knives. And while making Clay deadly, Van Dorn had taught him the fine art of investigation.
Clay still mourned the day they parted company.
Van Dorn had refused to make him a partner on the grounds that Clay was more interested in currying favor with industrialists than imprisoning criminals. Van Dorn, as bitterly disappointed in his choice of protégé as any man could be with this first failure, had also suspected — but could never prove — that the brilliant Henry Clay had thrown the bomb that set off the deadly Haymarket Riot.
Clay had not seen Van Dorn in many years. But he was aware, and he knew Van Dorn was, too, of the other’s presence in the detective line: Van Dorn, chief of an outfit extending its reach from regional to national; the younger Clay yet to make a bigger mark than a lucrative one-man outfit courting a clientele of rich and powerful financiers.
Back from the coalfields, Henry Clay locked the door to his private office. He kept a brass telescope in the window, a powerful instrument made for a harbormaster, which he swept across the fronts of the office-building headquarters of Wall Street tycoons. An expert lip-reader, he fleshed out their conversations with information he had acquired by bribing the engineers and mechanicians who installed their voice tubes, telephones, and private telegraph lines to reroute them through his.
This morning he focused his spyglass on a one-hundred-thousand-dollar, life-size white marble sculpture — Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss—which decorated the private office of a steel magnate that Wall Street men rated more cold-blooded than robber baron Frick at his worst. He was the financial titan who forged the old empires of Carnegie and Frick into the United States Steel Corporation — Judge James Congdon.
Judge Congdon was unyielding in his opposition to union labor. As Clay focused on the old man’s lips, Congdon was haranguing a visitor, a rich owner of coal mines, who was listening attentively.
“Labor’s victory will be not to labor when modern machines work for them. Until then, they’ll accept their place in God’s estate, if I have anything to do with it. And I do. After machines replace them, God knows how they’ll spend their time.” He whirled abruptly to his desk, moving with startling speed for a man his age, and wrote a note in a flowing hand:
There will be great profit in providing them games.
Congdon’s visitor nodded obsequiously.
Clay focused his spyglass on the mineowner’s face and took pleasure in watching him squirm. “Black Jack Gleason,” he whispered. “Not such a big man here in Wall Street, are you?”
Gleason was standing in Congdon’s office, literally hat in hand, worrying the brim of his homburg with anxious fingers, while James Congdon bullied him. Even lip-reading only parts of their conversation, as Congdon occasionally turned his face from the window, it was clear to Clay that the financier was calling the tune. The biggest coal baron in West Virginia was no match for a Wall Street titan hell-bent on consolidating the industry. Congdon’s money controlled the steel mills, and the coking plants that bought coal, and the railroads that not only burned it in their locomotives but also set the rates to ship it.
“Have you read Darwin?” Congdon asked contemptuously.
“I don’t believe so, Mr. Congdon.”
“The weak perish, the fittest survive.”
“Oh yes, sir. I know who you mean.”
“Mr. Darwin knows his business. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes. The weak die — perish. We’ll always have the poor. It’s the way of the world.”
“The way of the world,” said Congdon, “brings us to the business of digging coal less expensively than the next man. Wouldn’t you agree?”
Henry Clay, a painter like his mother though not as gifted, likened Congdon’s craggy face to a sunless, cold north slope gullied by storm water. It was no surprise, looking at that face, that Judge Congdon was the most powerful man in Wall Street, and Henry Clay’s chest filled with hope in the knowledge that he was about to hitch his wagon to an element as mighty as fire.
Judge James Congdon listened with a cold smile as the now thoroughly cowed Black Jack Gleason turned to flattery to try to shift the subject from the price of coal.
“Some members of the Duquesne Club were wondering out loud at lunch the other day whether you would consider a run at public office?”
“The ‘people’ won’t elect a banker president,” Congdon replied.
“I’ll bet you could change their minds.”
“No, they won’t vote for a Wall Street man. I know. I ran for governor and I lost. They beat the pants off me.”
“There’s always a next time.”
Congdon shrugged his broad and bony shoulders. “Who knows what the future holds?” he asked modestly while thinking to himself, I do. Next time, I know how to win.
“First thing you ought to do,” said Gleason, “is get the damned newspapers to stop complaining about your senators.”
“If only it were that simple, Gleason. The papers can howl their heads off about bribing congressmen and buying senators. People don’t give a hang. Oh no. People expect it. People admire a president who controls Congress.”
“So you would consider running for president?”
“Who knows what the future holds?” Congdon repeated. “Other than that in the immediate future, starting this afternoon, my mills will pay twenty cents a ton less than you’ve gotten used to, and my roads and barges will increase our shipping rates by five percent.”
Gleason turned pale.
“How am I to make a profit?”
“Rob Peter to pay Paul.”
“How do you mean?”
“You may think of me as Paul. Labor is Peter. After you meet my terms and get your coal on the market, you can keep whatever you can hold on to. In other words, pay labor less.”
“I’m doing everything I can, but, I warn you, labor is fighting back.”
Judge James Congdon stood to his full height. “I warn you: I will not subsidize any mine operator’s failure to bring labor to heel.”
10
Heading out to meet Isaac Bell, Joseph Van Dorn swaggered proudly from the high-class Cadillac Hotel on Broadway, where he had just signed the lease on a suite of rooms for his brand-new New York field office. He was not one to throw money around, but a client clapping eyes on its fine limestone façade would not be inclined to quibble over fees. And having passed through its marble lobby — under the watchful eye of top-notch house detectives supplied by Van Dorn in exchange for a break on the rent — and been wafted upstairs in its gilded elevator, the client would count himself lucky that the Van Dorn Detective Agency agreed to take his case.