The Associates: Four Capitalists Who Created California by Richard Rayner (2007)
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Rayner takes us into the lives of four men — Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins, known as the Big Four, or the Associates. More specifically, it focuses on how they banded together to build the Central Pacific Railroad, and then the Southern Pacific. It’s a tale of rapine and greed, as all four men became fabulously wealthy — first through the money skimmed off from government subsidies and bonds, through political corruption (copious bribes reaping huge rewards), and eventually from control over the rail monopoly in California and much of the Western US.
In so doing, however, they did in fact define the face of California, by choosing where and when to put in rail lines, often based on trying to outsmart potential competing lines (when they couldn’t manipulate Congress, the Administration, or state governments) or from out-and-out blackmail against communities that might — with sufficient cash incentives — get the rails coming through. The “Octopus” of the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads dominated the state, economically and politically, for many years.
The audaciousness of the men involved — master planner Huntington, quiet cooker-of-books Hopkins, vain politician Stanford, and construction boss and group moderator Crocker — is astonishing, both in what they tried to do (and accomplished), and in their utter shamelessness in theft, fraud, corporate malfeasancfe, bribery, political corruption, and personal vendetta.
For all of that, it turned out to be hollow, as none of the men ended up personally happy nor, for that matter, that well-known today, at least compared to the Eastern robber barons. But all of the Associates, through their machinations, left an indelible mark on the state of California that persists to this day.
Rayner’s work is a relatively quick read, easy in style. It’s well-researched, and gives a good, somewhat vivid narrative of the rise and fall of the four men and their partnership, but it still feels more of a survey than an in-depth tale of either the men or their deeds. It is, however, a great book for anyone who wants a solid introduction to know more about California’s history, corporate shenanigans in the Gilded Age, or the building of the railroads in the West. Recommended.