sons owned $65,000,000 of this $319,000,000 worth of land, and that eighty-eight persons owned $136,000,000 worth or one-half of the entire business center of Chicago. Doubling the sums credited to Field and Leiter (that is to say, adding the value of the improvements to the value of the land, this brought Field's real estate in that one section to a value of $22,000,000, and Leiter's to nearly the same. This estimate was confirmed to a surprising degree by the inventory of Field's executors reported to the court early in 1907. The executors of Field's will placed the value of his real estate in Chicago at $30,000,000. This estimate did not include $8,000,000 worth of land which the executors reported that he owned in New York City, nor the millions of dollars of his land possessions elsewhere.

FIELD'S MANY POSSESSIONS

Field left a fortune of about $100,000,000 (as estimated by the executors) which he bequeathed principally to two grandsons, both of which heirs were in boyhood. The factors constituting this fortune are various. At least $55,000,000 of it was represented at the time that the executors made their inventory, by a multitude of bonds and stocks in a wide range of diverse industrial, transportation, utility and mining corporations. The variety of Field's possessions and his numerous forms of ownership were such that we shall have pertinent occasion to deal more relevantly with his career in subsequent parts of this work.

The careers of Field, Leiter and several other Chicago multimillionaires ran in somewhat parallel grooves. Field was the son of a farmer. He was born in Conway, Mass., in 1835. When twenty-one he went to Chicago and worked in a wholesale dry goods house. In 1860 he was made a partner. During the Civil War this firm, as did the entire commercial world, proceeded to hold up the nation for exorbitant prices in its contracts at a time of distress. The Government and the public were forced to pay the highest sums for the poorest material. It was established that Government officials were in collusion with the contractors. This extortion formed one of the saddest and most sordid chapters of the Civil War (as it does of all wars), but conventional history is silent on the subject, and one is compelled to look elsewhere for the facts of how the commercial houses imposed at high prices shoddy material and semi-putrid food upon the very army and navy that fought for their interests. In the words of one of Field's laudatory biographers, "the

In those parts of this work relating to great fortunes from railroads and from industries, this phase of commercial life is specifically dealt with. The enormities brazenly committed during the Spanish-American War of 1898 are sufficiently remembered. Napoleon had the same experience with French contractors, and the testimony of all wars is to the same effect. The gigantic profiteering by American corporations during the World War of 1914-1918 was shown by the reports of the Federal Trade Commission, Congressional committees and by those of other official bodies. But even more so by the net income reported by the industrial corporations themselves. Calculating upon returns of a group of these, there was ground for

firm coined money"-a phrase which, for the volumes of significant meaning embodied in it, is an epitome of the whole profit system.

Some of the personnel of the firm changed several times: in 1865 Field, Leiter and Potter Palmer (who had also become a multimillionaire) associated under the firm name of Field, Leiter & Palmer. The great fire of 1871 destroyed the firm's buildings, but they were replaced. Subse quently the firm became Field, Leiter & Co., and, finally in 1887, Marshall Field & Co.10 The firm conducted both a wholesale and retail business on what is called in commercial slang "a cash basis:" that is, it sold goods on immediate payment and not on credit. The volume of its business rose to enormous proportions. In 1884 it reached an aggregate of $30,000,000 a year; in 1901 it was estimated at fully $50,000,000 a

year.

concluding that the entire number of corporations in the United States gathered in approximately $4,800,000,000 more per year during three of the war years, 19161918, than during three of the pre-war years 1912-1914.

10

So_valuable was a partnership in this firm that, according to a writer of the time, Field paid Leiter "an unknown number of millions" when he bought out Leiter's interest.

Chapter IX

THE FIELD FORTUNE IN EXTENSO

IN CLOSE similarity to the start of the Astors and many other founders of great land fortunes, commerce was the original means by which Marshall Field obtained the money which he invested in land. Consecutively came a ramification of other revenue-producing properties. Once in motion, the process worked in the same admixed, interconnected way as it did in the amassing of contemporary large fortunes. It may be literally compared to hundreds of golden streams flowing from as many sources to one central point. From land, business, railroads, street railways, public utility and industrial corporations-from these and many other channels, prodigious profits kept, and still keep, pouring in ceaselessly. In turn, these formed ever newer and widening distributing radii of investments. The process, by its own resistless volition, became one of continuous compound progression.

LAND FOR ALMOST NOTHING

Long before the business of the firm of Marshall Field & Co. had reached the annual total of $50,000,000, Field, Leiter and their associates had begun buying land in Chicago. Little capital was needed for the purpose. The material growth of Chicago explains sufficiently how a few dollars put in land seventy-five or ninety years ago became in time an automatically-increasing fund of millions. A century or so ago the log cabin of John Kinzie was the only habitation on a site now occupied by a swarming, conglomerate, rushing population of 3,376,438.1 Where the prairie land once stretched in solitude, a huge, roaring, choking city now stands, black with factories, the habitat of nearly three and a half millions of human beings, living in a whirlpool of excitement and tumult, presenting extremes of wealth and poverty, the many existing in dire straits, the few rolling in sovereign luxury.

Land, in the infancy of the city, was cheap; few settlers there were, and the future could not be foreseen. In 1830 one-quarter of an acre could be bought for $20; a few bits of silver, or any currency whatsoever, would secure to the buyer a deed carrying with it a title forever, with a perpetual right of exclusive ownership and a perpetual hold upon all succeeding generations. The more population grew, the greater the 1 Census of 1930.

value their labor gave the land; and the keener their need, the more difficult it became for them to get land.

Within ten years-by about the beginning of the year 1840-the price of a quarter of an acre in the center of the city had risen to $1,500. A decade later the established value was $17,500, and in 1860, $282,000. Chicago was growing with great rapidity; a network of railroads converged there; mammoth factories, mills, grain elevators, packing houses a vast variety of manufacturing and mercantile concerns set up in business, and brought thither swarms of workingmen and their families, led on by the need of food and the prospects of work. The greater the influx of workers, the more augmented became the value of land. Inevitably the greatest congestion of living resulted.

By 1870 the price of a quarter of an acre in the heart of the city bounded to $10,000, and by 1880, to $130,000.

IT BECOMES WORTH MILLIONS

During the next decade-a decade full of bitter distress to the working population of the United States, and marked by widespread suffering -the price shot up to $900,000. By 1894-a panic year, in which millions of men were out of work and in a state of appalling destitutiona quarter of an acre reached the gigantic value of $1,250,000.2 At this identical time large numbers of the working class, which had so largely created this value, were begging vainly for work, and were being evicted by the tens of thousands in Chicago because they could not pay rent for their miserable, cramped habitations.

By exchanging a few hundred, or a few thousand dollars, in Chicago's extreme youth, for a scrap of paper called a deed, the buyer of this land found himself, after the lapse of years, a millionaire. It did not matter where or how he obtained the purchase money: whether he swindled, or stole, or inherited it, or made it honestly-so long as it was not counterfeit, the law was observed. After he got, the land he was under no necessity of doing anything more than hold on to it, which same he could do equally well, whether in Chicago or buried in the depths of Kamschatka. If he choose, he could get chronically drunk; he could gamble, or drone in laziness; he could do anything but work. Nevertheless, the land and all its values which others created, were his forever, to enjoy and dispose of as suited his individual pleasure.

This was, and is still, the system. Thoroughly riveted in law, it was regarded as a rational, beneficent and everlasting fixture of civilized life— by the beneficiaries. And as these latter happened to be, by virtue of their possessions, among the real rulers of government, their conceptions and interests were embodied in law, thought and custom as the edict of civilization. The whole concurrent institutions of society, which were but 'Eighth Annual Report, Illinois Labor Bureau: 370.

the echo of property interests, pronounced the system wise and just, and, as a reigning force, do still so proclaim it. In such a state there was nothing abnormal in any man monopolizing land and exclusively appropriating its revenues. On the contrary, it was considered a superior stroke of business, a splendid example of astuteness. Marshall Field was looked upon as a very sagacious business man.

FIELD'S REAL ESTATE TRACTS

Field bought much land when it was of comparatively inconsequential value, and held on to it with a tenacious grip. In the last years of his life, his revenues from his real estate were uninterruptedly enormous. "Downtown real estate in Chicago," wrote "a popular writer" in a typically effusive biographical account of Field published in 1901, "is about as valuable, foot for foot, as that in the best locations in New York City. From $8,000 to $15,000 a front foot are not uncommon figures for property north of Congress street, in the Chicago business district. Marshall Field owns not less than twenty choice sites and buildings in this section; not including those used for his drygoods business. In the vicinity of the Chicago University buildings he owns square block after block of valuable land. Yet farther south he owns hundreds of acres of land in the Calumet region-land invaluable for manufacturing purposes." This extension and centralization of land ownership were accompanied by precisely the same results as were witnessed in other cities, although these results were the sequence of the whole social and industrial system, and not solely of any one phase. Poverty grew in exact proportion to the growth of large fortunes; the one presupposed, and was built upon, the existence of the other. Chicago became full of slums and fetid, overcrowded districts; and if the density and congestion of population are not as great as in New York, Boston and Cincinnati, it is only because of more favorable geographical conditions.

Field's fortune was heaped up in about the last twenty years of his life. The celerity of its progress arose from the prolific variety and nature of his possessions. To form even an approximate idea of how fast wealth came in to him, it is necessary to picture millions of men, women and children toiling day after day, year in and year out, getting a little less than two parts of the value of what they produced, while almost nine portions either went to him entirely or in part. But this was not all. Add to these millions of workers the rest of the population of the United States who had to buy from, or in some other way pay tribute to, the many corporations in which Field held stock, and you get some adequate conception of the innumerable influxions of gold which poured into Field's coffers every minute, every second of the day, whether he were awake or asleep; whether sick or well, whether traveling or sitting stock still.