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Oscar Lewis (1893-1992) http://tinyurl.com/OLewis

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Clash of Interests

From The Big Four, 1938.

Reader: Kevin Hearle

Many of California's early builders had firm ideas about how to improve the Golden State. Just as firm was the resolve of speculators who fueled these dreams with cash.

Theodore Judah's dream was a transcontinental railroad, an undertaking made possible with the help of Sacramento financiers Charles Crocker, Collis P. Huntington, Mark Hopkins, and Leland Stanford. As told in historian Oscar Lewis's classic 1938 account The Big Four, however, the engineer and his financial "associates" didn't always see things the same way.

The engineer saw the traffic of the nation, and of the Orient, passing over the line for generations in the future. The four speculators were looking toward the moment when the rails would be laid far enough into the foothills to enable them to underbid competition for the freight and passenger business with Nevada Territory. . . .

It was another skirmish in the traditional battle between the builder and the speculator; between men whose aim was to create and those whose sole purpose was to make a profit—as large a profit as possible as quickly as possible. In his railroad-building activities in the East, Judah must have encountered some manifestations of these opposed viewpoints; but in California circumstances had conspired to sharpen the contest. For a dozen years business on the Coast had been speculative to a degree unknown in older communities. The Sacramento four were well schooled in the hothouse atmosphere, where prices changed so rapidly that a few days, even a few hours, often meant the difference between a large profit and a heavy loss.

Besides The Big Four, Oscar Lewis wrote other important books of history, including Silver Kings, the story of the Comstock Load.