Thomas Alexander Scott
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thomas Alexander Scott (December 28, 1823–May 21, 1881) was an American railroad manager. He was vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad from 1860, later president, and president of Union Pacific Railroad between 1871 and 1872. He is considered by some to be the most successful white-collar criminal in American history. While Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Railroad, Scott tricked the Pennsylvania legislature into allowing him to create the first holding company. This allowed him to purchase and hold corporations at a time in which such ownership was illegal.
Scott was born in Fort Loudoun, Pennsylvania. He joined the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1850 as a station agent, and by 1858 was general superintendent.
Scott was successful in standardizing the Pennsylvania Railroad system. When the Civil War started, Scott was important to the Union effort. No one knew more about railroad lines than Scott. At one point he engineered the movement of 25,000 troops in 24 hours, turning the tide of battle once more to a union victory. Scott's influence in politics was huge, thereby breaking another containment law, that of corporate involvement in politics.
The first thing Scott did was to purchase newspapers so as to sway public perceptions of corporate behavior, specifically the railroad's desire to purchase and standardize the railroad lines across the state. Railroads were at that time a new player in the transportation industry. Towns were created or destroyed, depending on whether the railroad came that way.
The crime that caused the voters to never elect any of these legislators except one again was the allowing of a corporation to buy and sell another corporation. This was then illegal, as established by the corporate containment laws of the revolution. Remember that the revolution was fought more against the British corporations than the crown. The crown had for centuries allowed the corporations free reign in the colonies. The corporations were the empire builders, the governors, the slavers, the murderers, the creators of racism. The East India Trading company had an army larger than the crown's in 1770. This was all still fresh in the American memory of 1850.
After the war, Scott, along with his protégé Andrew Carnegie, convinced the United States Government to award the railroads with 10% of the land in the U.S. for building an intercontinental railroad. The railroads still own all this land. A very ugly low point in this man's life was when he blended the Ku Klux Klan into the railroad's board of directors as he moved through the South. He did this in order to stop the attacks by the Klan on the railroad's work crews of newly emancipated slaves. The South was no different from the North in its hatred for corporations. Tom again bought newspapers, forcing editors to bend to corporate propaganda.
Tom's paperwork was always carefully destroyed by him. All his efforts helped bring about the "selection" of Hayes as president over Tilden.
