The Life and Death Consequences of Capitalism

Writing history always involves making choices about audience. How much information can our audience handle? How technical or theoretical should we be? The process inevitably involves a series of compromises between telling a good story, consciously and explicitly evaluating the evidence, presenting the full evidentiary base, and—that killer of prose—historiographical positioning. Picking up Tycoon's War, one is immediately struck by the blend of compromises it represents. It has the frame of the usual scholarly apparatus: notes, bibliography, and index. But the notes are scanty unto vanishing, and they reflect the serious use of only a fraction of the sources shown in the bibliography. Furthermore, fifteen minutes of research in a library catalog immediately turns up several works that Dando-Collins has ignored, not to mention his almost complete failure to consult Spanish language sources. So what do we get for this compromise on the scholarly end of the scale?

Tycoon's War, despite the titular emphasis on Cornelius Vanderbilt, is actually about William Walker's (in)famous filibustering expedition to Nicaragua in the 1850s. Indeed, much of the book is a biography of Walker, presented somewhat in parallel with a biography of Vanderbilt. There is little doubt about the compelling interest of Vanderbilt's personality, and Walker's story can be made into a rollicking good adventure story, which is Dando-Collins's intent. Dando-Collins is a historian born in, and now resident in, Australia, who has written a number of other works with the similar intent of telling a good story and drawing his audience into the narrative. Indeed, in the last few years he has produced a veritable flood of dramatic retellings of famous moments in the history of ancient Rome; works he preceded with another on the Ponca Indian Standing Bear. ¹

In addition to its prima facie appeal and a generally entertaining prose style, Tycoon's War has the advantage of appearing at a time of great economic crisis, not a little engendered by the kind of capitalist greed, if not outright corruption, that Vanderbilt represented for another era. The reading public may need a reminder that America has a long history of men willing to go to almost any length in pursuit of wealth and the main chance. Dando-Collins gives us this portrait twice over, in the two very different but equally ambitious trajectories of Walker and Vanderbilt.

Tycoon's War begins in 1849, with Vanderbilt already an established and powerful shipping magnate, but with a long future of acquisition and expansion still in front of him. At this point, one of his main priorities was to secure a commanding position in the shipment of emigrants and materials across the Central American isthmus toward the California gold rush, and to carry back the gold. Most Americans now associate such a route with the narrowest point where the Panama Canal would eventually be built. Nicaragua's river and lake systems, however, were a viable early alternative. Vanderbilt moved quickly and ruthlessly to broker a deal granting him a monopolistic control over that route. In many ways this is the most interesting and novel part of the book. There are a series of extraordinary deals, backstabbings, and corrupt arrangements that would make Halliburton blush, with the ultimate result for Dando-Collins's purposes of creating an environment in which Vanderbilt saw himself deeply invested, for financial and personal reasons, in the government of Nicaragua.

Into that environment of Vanderbilt's interest, for entirely different reasons, stepped William Walker and his band of filibusters. Walker is the most famous, and generally the most successful (temporarily), of the breed of American adventurers who sought to establish themselves as colonists, if not rulers, of chunks of the former Spanish empire in America. By 1850, American settlers had reached North America's Pacific coast. The frontier was closing, and a belief in Manifest Destiny...