He had ore within easy hauling distance, and he had fuel, and he had,
as time went on, a rapidly increasing market. Labor was cheap and
plentiful, too, and being American-born, was willing and intelligent.
Perhaps Anthony Cardew's sins of later years were due to a vast
impatience that the labor of the early seventies was no longer to be
had.
The Cardew fortune began in the seventies. Up to that time there was
a struggle, but in the seventies Anthony did two things. He went to
England to see the furnaces there, and brought home a wife, a timid,
tall Englishwoman of irreproachable birth, who remained always an alien
in the crude, busy new city. And he built himself a house, a brick house
in lower East Avenue, a house rather like his tall, quiet wife, and run
on English lines. He soon became the leading citizen. He was one of the
committee to welcome the Prince of Wales to the city, and from the very
beginning he took his place in the social life.
He found it very raw at times, crude and new. He himself lived with
dignity and elegant simplicity. He gave now and then lengthy, ponderous
dinners, making out the lists himself, and handing them over to his
timid English wife in much the manner in which he gave the wine list and
the key to the wine cellar to the butler. And, at the head of his
table, he let other men talk and listened. They talked, those industrial
pioneers, especially after the women had gone. They saw the city the
center of great business and great railroads. They talked of its coal,
its river, and the great oil fields not far away which were then in
their infancy. All of them dreamed a dream, saw a vision. But not all of
them lived to see their dream come true.
Old Anthony lived to see it.
In the late eighties, his wife having been by that time decorously
interred in one of the first great mausoleums west of the mountains,
Anthony Cardew found himself already wealthy. He owned oil wells and
coal mines. His mines supplied his coke ovens with coal, and his own
river boats, as well as railroads in which he was a director, carried
his steel.
He labored ably and well, and not for wealth alone. He was one of a
group of big-visioned men who saw that a nation was only as great as its
industries. It was only in his later years that he loved power for
the sake of power, and when, having outlived his generation, he had
developed a rigidity of mind that made him view the forced compromises
of the new regime as pusillanimous.
He considered his son Howard's quiet strength weakness. “You have no
stamina,” he would say. “You have no moral fiber. For God's sake, make a
stand, you fellows, and stick to it.”
He had not mellowed with age. He viewed with endless bitterness the
passing of his own day and generation, and the rise to power of younger
men; with their “shilly-shallying,” he would say. He was an aristocrat,
an autocrat, and a survival. He tied Howard's hands in the management of
the now vast mills, and then blamed him for the results.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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