History of the Great American Fortunes Volume 3

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1910 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER X1V THE HILL FORTUNE Unsparingly criticised, and frequently assailed with extreme bitterness in his early career, few magnates have been the subject of more lavish eulogy in his latter years than James J. Hill. As his wealth and power rapidly grew, and he became a multimillionaire, and dictator of the political and industrial affairs of large sections of the United States and Canada, the usual transformation resulted. He ceased being the familiar "Jim " Hill derisively slurred as the "Jay Gould of the Northwest," and was metamorphosed into the great Mr, Hill, the imposing genius of stupendous achievement. A crowd of writers, well schooled in the extravagant language of sycophancy, came forth to proclaim his heroic proportions as a master mind in the constructive development of the country's resources. For full thirty years these eulogies, all suspiciously alike as though inspired from a central source, have continuously appeared. 1n all of them one special dithyrambic note has been pressed. With infinite rhetorical variations, such transcendent terms as "genius of transportation " and " intellectual giant " have been freely applied to Hill. 1ngeniously put forward under many dictional disguises and artful tricks of style, the burden of these lays had been the same as that so much remarked in the endless panegyrics of the Astors, the Vanderbilts, J. Pierpont Morgan, Blair, Sage, and nearly all other magnates. . , Always there is the emphasis, strongly denoting 'an argument for a client, upon Hill's extraordinary capacity and integrity; how he obtained every dollar of his vast fortune honestly, and how (it is specified) corruption and graft have been conspicuously absent in the methods by which he amassed his wea'th. One steady...