Posted Friday morning, December 11, 2020.
Detail from “A Conversation Piece” by Solomon J. Solomon, 1884, Leighton House Museum, Kensington, Great Britain, via The Victorian Web. Used as the cover illustration for the 1987 Penguin Classics edition of Henry James’ “The Golden Bowl”.
Reimagined and reworked, this little vignette from Michael Hiltzik’s “Iron Empires”, could have wound up as a scene in a novel or story by Mark Twain, Henry James,William Dean Howells, or Edith Wharton, all of whom were satirists drawing on the follies and foibles of the social and financial elite of the late 1890s when this happened, Such is the constancy of human nature that it could have been a scene out of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fielding, Gogol, Dickens, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville---before Twain and the others, and contemporaneously and after them---Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, Evelyn Waugh, Agatha Christie (with either male protagonist the victim or a suspect), Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Gore Vidal, Tom Wolfe, Caleb Carr, Hilary Mantel, and George R.R. Martin, just to make a partial list of writers in English. But it’s a real scene from history. Cast of characters: James J. Hill, a genial but ruthless and rapacious banker and railroad tycoon, owner of the Northern Pacific Railroad and a rival of E.H. Harriman, the president of the Union Pacific Railroad; Jacob Schiff, Harriman’s partner, who had the task of negotiating a merger of Hill’s and Harriman’s railroads; Therese Schiff, Jacob Schiff’s beloved wife; E.H. Harriman, offstage. My favorite detail is the orange juice nightcap:
In his social relationships, Hill was bluff, breezy, and excessively familiar. Invited to dine at Schiff’s home at 9:32 Fifth Avenue, Hill tended to overstay his welcome, chatting volubly, oblivious to his host’s waning patience. Schiff’s servant Joseph would materialize at 10 p.m. sharp with his employer’s nightcap of orange juice, a signal Hill invariably overlooked. “Mr. Hill, your taxi is waiting,” Joseph would whisper, to which Hill would command in reply, “Send it away!” Hill was accustomed to fidget noisily with a little bag of uncut precious stones as he talked. One evening as he noticed Therese Schiff’s admiring one of the stones, he presented it to her. Jacob Schiff examined the gift disapprovingly. “Only I give jewels to my wife,” he stated, telling Therese, “Give it back.” Harriman, by contrast, was a chilly and taciturn companion, except within his immediate family circle. Otherwise his conversation focused on business matters. That suited Schiff just fine.
---from “Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America ” by Michael Hiltzik.
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