J. P. Morgan, your railroad is a crime

“I wish that someone would lock [J.] Pierpont Morgan up for homicides already committed on his Southern roads…. One of my boys pulled out fourteen spikes with his fingers on a two mile stretch on the Atlantic Coast main line, in North Carolina…. You are going after the New Haven [Railroad] people right.”

– California Congressman William Kent in a 1913 letter to “People’s Lawyer” Louis Brandeis, who was mounting an epic challenge to Morgan’s railroad monopoly. (Brandeis wrote back to Kent, a fellow reformer: “I note what you say about the condition of the Atlantic Coast main Line. It is, as you say, Morganatic.”)