Sublime

He was like a farmer trying to convince a sly mule that the way to the feed house went through the plow fields.

He was as important to the founding of a modern and multiethnic twentieth- and twenty-first century America as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison and Samuel Adams were to the creation of the republic in the eighteenth century. This is not hyperbole. It is fact—observable, discernible, undeniable fact.

Hill especially loved to hold forth on four subjects near and dear to his heart: free trade, resource depletion and conservation, agriculture, and of course, railroading.

Morgan made his specialty the refinancing, reorganization, and rationalization of America’s badly overextended and overcapitalized railroads; his “clients” included some of the largest, such as the Erie, the New York Central, and the Pennsylvania.

Among the various guests on board with Flagler on the morning of January 22 was Assistant Secretary of War Robert Shaw Oliver, the personal representative of President Taft, sharing a ride that was so sought after that it took a last-minute call from William Krome to Flagler direct to get himself on board.

Year by year, Hill and his railroad organizations assembled an elaborate system of agricultural research and promotion.

Constant ferment—keep things stirred up and other people guessing—was the elder Ford’s working formula for progress.