1906 - Commerce

Commerce

Congress appropriates $2.5 million for relief following the April 18 San Francisco earthquake after rejecting offers of foreign aid. New York bankers loan hundreds of millions to rebuild the city (see 1907).

San Francisco banker A. P. (Amadeo Peter) Giannini, 35, hitches a team of horses to a borrowed produce wagon and manages to rescue the gold and securities in his vault. Giannini built his stepfather's wholesale produce business into the largest in the city, sold out his share in 1901, founded his Bank of Italy in 1904, and has been making loans to small farmers and businessmen. Having defied banking orthodoxy by actively soliciting customers, he loads $2 million in gold, coins, and securities onto his wagon bed, covers it all with produce, and heads home. Many other bankers want to remain shut until they have had a chance to sort out the damage, but Giannini sets up shop on the docks near North Beach and extends credit "on a face and a signature" to almost any small businessman or individual; given that he is the only banker in town with enough capital to make loans for rebuilding, Giannini's reliance on gold reserves will enable him to survive next year's financial panic (see Bank of America, 1928).

Labor leader George E. McNeill dies at Somerville, Mass., May 19 at age 68, having championed the 8-hour day.

Australia removes her last protective tariffs, contributing to a slowdown in manufacturing that was predicted by those opposed to federation; gold mining also declines, but wheat growing expands at a rapid pace.

Diamond mining magnate Alfred Beit dies a bachelor at his palatial Park Lane, London, residence July 17 at age 53, having left Johannesburg in 1908 following a stroke. He leaves vast bequests to fund university education in South Africa, Rhodesia, Britain, and Germany; his brother Otto, 41, retires with a large fortune to devote his efforts to developing the Rhodes Trust and other institutions.

Manual of Political Economics (Manuale d'economia politica) by Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, 58, at Switzerland's University of Lausanne elucidates a theory of pure economics with an analysis of ophelimity (the power to give satisfaction). The optimum allocation of society's resources cannot be attained, he says, so long as it is possible to make at least one individual better off (in his or her own estimation) while keeping others as they were before (in their own estimation).

Miner Harry Orchard confesses to last year's bombing that killed former Idaho governor Frank Steunenberg and others after interrogation by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency's western branch manager James McParland, who has made a career of subverting unions from within or acting as agent provacateur. McParland has promised him a reprieve from the hangman if he confessed, but Orchard claims that he was the hit-man for William Dudley "Big Bill" Haywood, 38, a miner since age 15 who helped found the IWW last year. Orchard also implicates IWW president Charles H. Moyer and miner-turned-merchant George A. Pettbone, who has advised the union. All three men are kidnapped at Denver in a plot hatched by McParland with Idaho's governor Frank Gooding and prosecutor James Hawley, who are in the pay of Idaho mining companies, IWW lawyers demand the men's release, Supreme Court justices pay a courtesy call on the White House, where President Roosevelt reads a letter calling his political antagonist Edward H. Harriman of the Union Pacific Railroad "at least as undesirable a citizen as [Eugene] Debs, or Moyer, or Heywood," the president thus overrides the presumption of innocence, and the Supreme Court rules December 3 that it was legal to extradite the IWW leaders from Colorado to Idaho to stand trial for murder (see 1907).

J. P. Morgan and steel magnate John W. Gates purchase Tennessee Coal & Iron Co., whose iron ore deposits are second in size only to those of United States Steel (see 1898; 1907).

Gary, Indiana, has its beginnings as United States Steel Corp. breaks ground for a new mill town on Lake Michigan. The town will be named to honor Big Steel's chairman Elbert Henry Gary, 60.

The Amalgamated Copper Co. headed by Standard Oil Co. chairman Henry H. Rogers acquires United Mining Co. and becomes the world's largest copper-mining concern.

E. I. du Pont de Nemours gains a near-monopoly in the U.S. powder industry (see 1902). Having bought up or otherwise absorbed the other members of the 34-year-old Gunpowder Trade Association (Powder Trust), it produces 100 percent of the privately-made smokeless powder, 80 percent of all saltpeter blasting powder, 75 percent of all black sporting powder, 72.5 percent of all dynamite, and 64.4 percent of all U.S.-made soda blasting powder. The Delaware legislature elects Henry Algernon du Pont to the U.S. Senate, where he will serve until 1917 (see 1915).

President Roosevelt appoints Secretary of the Navy Charles J. Bonaparte attorney general; now 55, Bonaparte uses the Sherman Act of 1890 to press antitrust suits aimed at breaking up many of the nation's monopolies, and he will file suit next year against E. I. du Pont de Nemours, whose officers will be found guilty in 1911 of conspiring to restrain trade in the explosives industry.

German cannon maker's daughter Bertha Krupp, 20, marries industrialist Gustav von Bohlen und Halbach, 34, who obtains an imperial edict permitting him to call himself "Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach" (see "Big Bertha," 1914).

Massachusetts-born speculator Jesse L. (Lauriston) Livermore, 29, arrives at New York with $2,500 he has made working in Boston, Chicago, and Denver bucket shops (crooked investment houses that find various ways to bilk their customers) (see 1907).

Wall Street's Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 100 for the first time January 12, up from 40.94 when it was created in 1896, but it closes December 31 at 94.35, down from 96.20 at the end of 1905.