California Quartet

THE BIG FOUR--Oscar Lewis--Knopf ($4.50).

Readers of recent muckraking histories like Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons are likely to feel they have heard all they want to about early U. S. railroad builders. In monotonous procession the great figures of the post-Civil War period follow each other--all up to their ears in political intrigues, angling for Federal land grants, corrupting legislatures, double-crossing the public, their stockholders and each other so consistently that it seems remarkable the railroads ever got built.

The Big Four of California (Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins and Collis P. Huntington), organizers of the Central Pacific, the Southern Pacific and innumerable West Coast companies, seem the most arrogant, most shameless of them all. Last week their group portrait appeared in a 424-page book which combined careful reports of skulduggery with excellent characterizations.

Although Oscar Lewis calls his book The Big Four, his first chapters make it plain that five men were instrumental in organizing the Central Pacific. The extra name was that of Theodore Dehone Judah, known as Crazy Judah in his prime, who surveyed the route of the Central Pacific over the Sierra Nevadas, persuaded Crocker, Stanford, Hopkins and Huntington (then Sacramento merchants) to back him, battled for Federal support, broke with his partners, and died in 1863, at 37, as the road he had dreamed about for years was at last being built. For Crazy Judah--"studious, industrious, resourceful, opinionated, humorless, and extraordinarily competent"--Author Lewis has great respect. The line he surveyed across the mountains, rising 7,000 feet in less than 20 miles, was the boldest feat of railroad engineering undertaken up to that time.

Judah's shopkeeping partners had none of his vision. Under the terms of the Central Pacific's Government grant, the company got loans of from $16,000 to $48,000 per mile, depending on the nature of the territory through which the road passed. While it was still being built through the Sacramento Valley, Judah was asked by his partners to testify that it was in the foothills, so that the company would receive $16,000 more for each mile of track. Unwilling to be a party to this miracle of moving mountains, Judah resigned, died soon after. This left the task of building the road in the hands of a drygoods merchant, a politician, the owners of a hardware store.

Crocker. After the road was finished, each partner believed he had been principally responsible. But big, blunt, bearded Charley Crocker simply said, "I built the Central Pacific," and let it go at that.

Weighing 250 lb., a hard-driving man with unaccountable periods of complete inertia, Crocker was in charge of the actual construction of the Central Pacific, boasted that he found fault with everything and that everybody was afraid of him. But on payday he rode through the construction crews with 150 lb. of gold and silver, paid workmen himself. Because he admired the endurance of his Chinese cook, he favored Chinese crews over his partners' objections. When the Central Pacific was stopped by wild mountain country (during 1866 only 28 miles of track were laid), the rival Union Pacific was pushing rapidly across level plains, making fortunes for its owners. The partners were frantic but Crocker only added more Chinese, had them digging through rock so hard that four crews advanced only eight inches a day. When Stanford sent steam drilling equipment, Crocker refused to let it be tried.

Stanford and Hopkins built huge houses on San Francisco's Nob Hill; Crocker spent $1,250,000 to rival them with a gaudy, towering architectural monstrosity. An undertaker who owned a small house in the same block refused to sell it; Crocker built a spite fence 40 feet high, completely enclosing his neighbor's home. Dennis Kearney led a mob to tea down the fence and hang Crocker from the flagpole atop his 76-foot tower, but the mob decided to burn Chinese laundries and beat up laundrymen instead.

Hopkins. The dullest of the quartet, "Uncle" Mark Hopkins was the only one who weighed less than 200 lb. Thin, worried, cautious, lazy, stubborn, plaintive, he ate little meat, drank no liquor and, even as a wealthy man, grew vegetables for his own table, selling the surplus. When he planned a quiet cottage on Nob Hill, his fun-loving wife, who greatly admired the romantic novels of Ouida, took over the planning of it, turned it into a huge mass of towers, gables, and steeples, with a dining room to seat 60 guests, a bedroom inlaid with ivory, ebony and semiprecious stones. Hopkins died before it was finished. Leaning on his hoe, he used to stare at it skeptically and ask reporters if they thought it would pay dividends.

Stanford. Admirers compared Leland Stanford with Napoleon, Caesar, Alexander the Great and John Stuart Mill, but Partner Collis Huntington described him tersely as "a damned old fool." His profound thought before he answered a question made people look upon him as a thinker, until they discovered that it took him as long to answer a simple question as a difficult one. Governor of California when the Central Pacific was started, Stanford loved the limelight as much as Huntington hated it, loved display, testimonials, speeches, luxury, built so many homes and farms that his vast estate was finally in danger. He planned Stanford University as a memorial for his son, died soon after it opened, with his affairs in such bad shape that it barely got through its first years. His widow took up his long quarrel with Huntington, modeled her life on that of Queen Victoria, called on Huntington shortly before her death to make peace with him. That cynical old millionaire's office was so poorly furnished that he had to send out to get a chair for her.

Huntington. Author Lewis' best portrait is that of Collis Huntington, "a hard and cheery old man, with no more soul than a shark," considered scrupulously dishonest by his contemporaries. His greatest virtue was that he never pretended to be better than he was. Ruthless, patient, working harder than the other partners, Huntington soon came to dominate them all. Only Stanford challenged him, and when Stanford decided to run for the Senate instead of aiding Huntington's friend, Huntington waited five years for his revenge. He announced that he would take Stanford's place as head of the Southern Pacific. In return, he would surrender certain papers he held in connection with Stanford's Senatorial campaign, would refrain from hostile expressions, and would work to have Stanford re-elected to the Senate. But when Stanford turned over the Southern Pacific's reins, Huntington announced that (unlike Stanford) he would not use the firm's money to buy elections. By the time he had finished breaking the rest of the agreement, one of the West's biggest scandals was under way.

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