Telephone is just full of fascinating passages:
Western Union had its own corporate troubles; the financial predator Jay Gould was seeking to devour it as he had devoured the Erie a decade earlier. Beginning in the middle 1870s, Gould had launched a characteristically intricate scheme to conquer Western Union by first bringing it to its knees. While attacking Western Union’s stock price in a series of bear raids in which, according to a contemporary observer, he used “every trick and art of Stock Exchange manipulation,” he quietly established a rival telegraph network of his own, the Atlantic and Pacific Company. As a result, Western Union’s business declined by two million dollars in one year. When the combination of stock manipulation and competition had forced Western Union’s price down to rock bottom, Gould secretly bought up its stock, and at last, in 1881, emerged in control of Western Union and of the national telegraph business. During 1877-79, when Western Union was striving to take over the telephone business from Bell, Gould’s Byzantine maneuver was in full cry. Western Union, at that time, was controlled by another notorious financier not noted for gentleness or sensitivity, William H. Vanderbilt. In sum, Western Union was in the thick of battle between jungle titans. If Vanderbilt had been victorious over Bell as Gould eventually was over Vanderbilt, the telephone business would have fallen into the hands of the most sinister and devious of all the beasts in the post-Civil War financial jungle, and one hesitates to think what its subsequent development might have been.
What I find remarkable about this is passage is that it’s almost complete bereft of substance. I learned from this that Gould bought up Western Union stock and obtained a controlling interest in the company. And I know he did some things in the stock exchange the author doesn’t approve of. And I learn that the author really, really dislikes Gould, for reasons that aren’t clear.
It is, again, hard to imagine a modern writer writing like this. We still have bitter power struggles in corporate boardrooms. But it’s hard to imagine a serious journalist or historian writing about “the financial predator Larry Ellison, the most sinister and devious of all the beasts of the Silicon Valley financial jungle.” I suppose that might make business stories more entertaining (and come to think of it, Ellison might enjoy the resulting notoriety), but it would certainly be an abdication of the historian’s obligation to strive for objectivity.
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