Happy Birthday, James J. Hill

Today is the 175th anniversary of the birth of James J. Hill, builder of the Great Northern Railway and one of the great entrepreneurs of the late 19th century. As a railfan, the Antiplanner likes Hill because the Great Northern has always been my favorite railroad. It is only a coincidence that Hill’s politics were pretty similar to mine.

Hill in 1915.

Wikipedia describes Hill as a Bourbon Democrat, meaning a classical liberal who supported free trade and opposed government subsidies and legislative efforts to protect corporations from competition. As I detail in an article that should soon be published by the Great Northern Railway Historical Society, Hill also believed that the federal government should stay out of conservation issues as it would likely do more harm than good.

Hill earned the nickname “Empire Builder” when he completed the Great Northern to Seattle just a few months before the Panic of 1893, the nation’s worst depression up to that point. This financial crisis put almost every other transcontinental railroad into bankruptcy, so Wall Street was highly impressed when Hill’s sound management kept the GN profitable throughout the economic downturn. Eventually, Hill’s transportation empire extended from Buffalo to Yokohama and from Winnipeg to Galveston, and today it forms the nucleus of BNSF, which is run from the James J. Hill Network Operations Center in Ft. Worth, Texas.

“He has captured more territory with the coupling pin, and made it habitable for man, than did Julius Caesar with the sword,” said John Wilson, a U.S. Senator from Washington, in 1909. He “was one of the first of our great railroaders to see the vision of vast miles of country as they might be, and then to go to work patiently to make the vision real,” wrote the New York Times in 1910. In 1912, the president of the Chicago Great Western Railway remarked that, “The name of James J. Hill will go down into history as the most remarkable character that our railroading industry has developed.”
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Some people called Hill a “robber baron” because he built a great railway. But he broke the monopolies that the Northern Pacific had on the mines of Helena and the Union Pacific had on the mines of Butte, cutting shipping rates from those cities by more than 50 percent. He continued to cut rates as business grew over the next two decades.

Other people call Hill a “social Darwinist” because he said, “The fortunes of railroad companies are determined by the law of the survival of the fittest.” But that’s not social Darwinism; it is merely an understanding that in a competitive world, business success depends on providing what people want at the lowest possible price.

The Minnesota Historical Society’s video about Hill, which should be above, includes interviews with Thomas White, of the James J. Hill Reference Library; Craig Johnson, who manages James J. Hill’s 36,000-square-foot mansion in St. Paul; and Rhoda Gilman, of the Minnesota Historical Society. I’ve met White a couple of times and he probably knows more about Hill than anyone else.

Johnson, however, got a couple of things wrong: Hill didn’t have assets of more than $200 million when he died; and he didn’t build west because the Canadian government refused to let him build into Manitoba. In fact, before changing the name to the Great Northern, his railway was called the Minneapolis, St. Paul & Manitoba and it reached to Winnipeg. He built west only when the Canadian government refused to allow the Canadian Pacific Railway, of which he was a founding partner, to include his railway as a part of its main line, as the government wanted an all-Canada route.

If you like trains as much as I do, take a look at my other blog, where this week I’ll be posting PDFs of Great Northern passenger train memorabilia.