The Square Pegs (12 page)

For every dollar the Crédit Mobilier spent in construction it charged the Union Pacific and the government two dollars. To prevent investigation, Congressman Ames carefully distributed free stock in Crédit Mobilier to fellow representatives and senators. This stock paid 625 per cent dividends within a year. Before the thievery was fully exposed the financiers of the Union Pacific had made themselves almost $44,000,000 in profits. The subsequent scandal ruined the reputations of the Vice-President of the United States and a great number of congressmen, and publicly embarrassed the entire Republican Party.

By the time the scandal took place Train had drifted far from the world of finance. He had become interested in politics and obsessed with a desire for publicity. Most journalists who spoke with him, while admitting his brilliance, felt that he was misdirecting his abilities. Several thought that he was losing his grip. “The Train of ideas,” a reporter on
The Nebraskan
remarked, “sometimes lacks the coupling-chains.”

The reporter on
The Nebraskan
was unusually perceptive. As a boy-merchant and young promoter Train had displayed remarkable talent. He was intelligent, clever, audacious, energetic, and inventive. But he lacked a central drive, a realistic goal. He was scatterbrained. He did too much too easily and too quickly. With concentration and purpose he might have made a solid reputation in any one of several professions as a financier, an author, or a politician.

Gradually, over a period of forty years, he descended into the most pitiful unreality and eccentricity because he wanted only attention. When he could no longer win attention through normal accomplishment, he employed every extreme stunt that came to mind. He cultivated the art of astonishment. Instead of honest dissent, born of careful thought and conviction, he became contrary for the mere sake of sensation.

He actively entered politics in 1869 because he had a Messiah complex. But he was a Messiah without a message, having merely the forensic equipment and evangelistic fervor to communicate nothing. As a politician, he was a half-baked thinker, part democrat and part fascist, part genius and part fool, never really insane, but surely psychopathic.

After his Crédit Mobilier period he was wealthy. On his two-and-a-half acres at Newport he had a villa and a special building for bowling and billiards that cost $100,000. He had a $50,000 guesthouse for his father-in-law. He had six carriages, and he claimed that it cost him $2,000 a week to live. But after he plunged into politics he neglected his business, his family, and his home, and lost all three in the continuing affair with his ego.

It was in a Dublin jail one of fifteen he occupied in his lifetime, usually for siding with revolutionary causes or assuming the bad debts of others that Train first conceived, as he put it, “a feeling of confidence that I might one day be President of the United States.”

1872 was a confusing election year, and Train hoped that he might benefit by the confusion. Ulysses S. Grant, a shy, highly moral man who liked whiskey, horses, cigars (he once smoked twenty-four in a day), and low company, was presented for re-election by the Republican Party. Grant’s well-meaning incompetence had permitted a shocking carnival of corruption during his first term. Many high-minded Republicans had had enough of him. They determined to break away from the regular party and nominate their own candidate.

These Liberal Republicans met in Cincinnati, wrote a platform that severely indicted Grant, and then cast about for a man who could defeat him. George Francis Train thought he was that man. On the second day of the convention he rose and shouted: “All aboard! Get aboard the express train of George Francis Train!” There was a brief snake-dance by his admirers, but when the actual balloting began, few delegates got aboard. On the sixth ballot, the pink-faced, angular, crusading editor of the
New York Tribune
, Horace Greeley, who looked like somebody’s grandmother, and whose slogan was “Turn the rascals out,” was nominated for the presidency. Train was astounded. He had hoped, even at the eleventh hour, that “the people would see the futility of supporting Greeley, and of placing me at the head of the ticket.”

But Train was not through. If no one would place him on an existing ticket, he would create a ticket of his own. And so he became the sole candidate of the Citizens’ Party. His entry into the campaign, however, did not clear the air for the voters. Everyone, it seemed, was running for the presidency that year. When the regular Democratic Party agreed to affiliate with the Liberal Republican in support of Greeley, a die-hard group of Independent Democrats refused to go along. These Democrats nominated Charles O’Conor, a prominent New York attorney, as the first Catholic ever to run for the presidency. Meanwhile, the Prohibition Party offered the electorate James Black, of Pennsylvania. And, perhaps most startling of all, the Equal Rights Party convened in New York City to nominate Victoria Claflin Woodhull for president.

Of all the candidates, George Francis Train was the most tireless. Resplendent in a blue swallow-tail coat with brass buttons, he stumped the nation from coast to coast, delivering 1,000 speeches that earned him $90,000 in admission fees. “I went into the campaign as into a battle,” he wrote later. “I forced fighting at every point along the line, fiercely assailing Grant and his nepotism on the one hand, and Greeley, and the spirit of compromise and barter that I felt his nomination represented, on the other.” Grant ignored Train’s broadsides, but Greeley was once sufficiently provoked to call him “an ass, a lunatic, a charlatan and a mountebank.”

In his campaign oratory Train promised to increase immigration from Europe, build trade with the Orient, and smash corruption. Once, when he denounced a ring of grafters in New York, he was asked to name names. He replied: “Hoffman, Tweed, Sweeney, Fisk, and Gould … Tweed and Sweeney are taxing you from head to foot, while their horses are living in palaces … To the lamp-post! All those in favor of hanging Tweed to a lamp-post, say aye!” As a matter of fact, Train exposed William Marcy “Boss” Tweed and his Tammany Hall gang, who would steal $200,000,000 from New York City in six years, long before
The New York Times
and Thomas Nast took credit for the same feat.

Train’s interviews, speeches, and writings during the course of the campaign became more and more unrestrained. He told one interviewer: “Of course you know that you are talking to the next President. I am also the greatest man in the world. I can give Buddha, Confucius, Moses, Mohammed, and all the rest of them, fifty on the string, and then discount them.” His election-year literature called him the “man of destiny,” ready and willing to rule the country with one hundred of America’s wealthiest men as his advisers, and added that he was “an instrument in the hands of some mysterious power, to emancipate the people from the slavery of Party and the Fanaticism of ages.” An editor of the
Washington Capital
, attending one of his speeches, decided that he should have been an actor, reporting: “He double-shuffles and stamps on the floor ‘till the dust obscures him; he beats his breast, clenches his fist, clutches his hair, plays ball with the furniture, outhowls the roaring elements… . And yet he is not happy; no, he wants to be President.”

President he could not be. Millions heard and enjoyed him, but did not take him seriously. When the votes were counted, U. S. Grant had 3,597,132. Horace Greeley had 2,834,125, Charles O’Conor had 29,408, James Black had 5,608, Victoria Woodhull had not been permitted to vote even for herself, and Train well, as far as the statistics could be trusted, Train had no votes at all.

He was bitter. He voiced his bitterness. “I thought I knew something of the people, and felt confident that they would prefer a man of independence, who had accomplished something for them, to a man who was a mere tool of his party, a distributor of patronage to his friends and relatives… . But I was mistaken. The people, as Barnum has said, love to be humbugged.”

It is difficult to think that he expected to win, or that he even took his three-year campaign for the Republican nomination and then for the presidency seriously. For late in 1870, when he was contesting for the nomination, he suddenly interrupted his campaign to take a trip around the world. True, he may have wanted to dramatize his candidacy by a spectacular feat. Or, as he claimed, he may have wanted to show his fellow Americans the value of fast transportation. But most likely, he wanted publicity for its own sake.

And so, at the age of forty-one, almost the age that Verne made Phileas Fogg, Train started westward in his race around the world to prove that the journey could be done in eighty days. Actually, he was away more than eighty days. He started from San Francisco early in August and did not return until late in December. While his traveling probably took eighty days, there was a two-month diversionary detour in France.

Train crossed the United States on the new Union Pacific he had helped to build. He gave 28 speeches in California, netting himself $10,000 and a host of new enemies. A talk he gave in San Francisco to industrialists and politicians was typical “If I had been the Federal general in command of California at the time [of the Civil War],” he said, “I should have hanged certain men, some of whom are present.”

On August 1, 1870, he boarded the
Great Republic
for Yokohama. When he reached Singapore he learned that Napoleon had been crushed at Sedan and that France was in a state of chaos. Nevertheless, he decided to proceed directly to France as the quickest route to his transatlantic connections in Liverpool.

After more than two months of travel, he arrived in Marseilles. No sooner had he settled in his suite at the Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix, than delegates of the revolutionary Commune called upon him. a We have heard of you and want you to join the revolution,” they told him. “Six thousand people are waiting for you now in the Opera House.”

Train had never, previously, shown interest in the International. But there were people waiting to see and hear him. There was the promise of excitement and publicity. It was inducement enough. He hurried to the jammed Alhambra Opera House, where the audience chanted his name and the glory of the uprising. “When the shouting ceased,” he recalled in his autobiography, “I told the people that I was in Marseilles on a trip around the world, but as they had called upon me to take part in their movement, I should be glad to repay, in my own behalf, a small portion of the enormous debt of gratitude that my country owed to France for Lafayette… .”

In the next weeks Train took over completely. He spoke against the Prussians. He spoke against Leon Gambetta’s Third Republic. He spoke on the average of seven times daily for twenty-three consecutive days. He led a march on the Marseilles military fortifications and helped run up the flag of the Red Republic. And finally, to give the Commune an experienced military leader, he summoned General Gustave Paul Cluseret from his Swiss exile. Cluseret had experience enough. He had fought for the North in the American Civil War, under General McClellan, and taken an active part in the Fenian Insurrection in Ireland. Now, handsome in a goldlaced uniform that Train purchased for him, he rushed off to the barricades in Paris. There, it might be added, he was arrested by the Commune itself for treason, eventually saved by government troops, and returned to Switzerland.

Meanwhile, Train remained in Marseilles, where he almost lost his life. One morning, observing soldiers marching beneath his hotel balcony, he mistook them for comrades of the Commune and shouted: “
Vive la Commune
!” Too late, Train realized they were government troops. They halted. Five riflemen stepped forward, knelt, and took aim at Train. Quickly Train snatched the flags of France and the United States off the balcony, draped them about his body, and shouted: “Fire, fire, you miserable cowards! Fire upon the flags of France and America wrapped around the body of an American citizen if you have the courage!” The firing squad was ordered back into line, and the troops moved on.

Shortly after, Train left Marseilles. He did not get far. In Lyons he was arrested for revolutionary activity and thrown into jail. He smuggled a note out to his frantic secretary, George P. Bemis, which read: “Am in St. Joseph Prison and secretly incarcerated.” Bemis, through the intervention of Alexandre Dumas, visited Train, then cabled President Grant, the
New York Sun
, and the London
Times
for help. After thirteen days in prison, during which he lost thirty pounds, Train was released and taken to Tours.

In the palace of the prefecture at Tours, he was ushered into the presence of the government leader, Leon Gambetta, who was seated at his desk. Gambetta did not stir. Train stood, waiting. “He made not the slightest signs of being aware that I was present. He did not even turn his face toward me. I did not learn until afterward that the distinguished Italian-Frenchman had one glass eye, and could see me just as well at an angle as he could full-face.”

Huffily Train asked to be seated. Gambetta motioned him to a seat. Train, as audacious as ever, immediately changed his political allegiance. “Monsieur Gambetta,” he began, “you are the head of France, and I intend to be President of the United States. You can assist me, and I can assist you… . Send me to America, and I can help you get munitions of war, and win over the sympathy and assistance of the Americans.”

Gambetta ignored this. He had something else on his mind. “You sent Cluseret to Paris,” he said, “and bought him a uniform for three hundred francs.”

“You are only fairly well informed, Monsieur Gambetta. I paid three hundred and fifty francs for the uniform.”

“Cluseret is a scoundrel.”

“The Communards call you that.”

The interview was over. Train was expelled from France. He resumed his journey around the world, chartering a special train to the Channel, and catching the ship Abyssinia in Liverpool for New York. Back home again, he crowed to the press that he had made the journey in eighty days. No one ever really counted the days. The record was accepted and publicized, and soon enough Phileas Fogg was born.