In April and May of 1901, James J. Hill of the Great Northern Railway (GN) fought a bitter war on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with E. H. Harriman of the Union Pacific (UP). Allied with the country's leading investment banker, J. P. Morgan, Hill had already taken control over his chief rival, the Northern Pacific Railway (NP). Now he sought to add the Burlington to his stable, thus giving his two transcontinentals a direct tie to Chicago. Harriman could not abide that outcome. Less than four years earlier, he had gained control of the UP, and in April 1901 Harriman's Union Pacific took a controlling interest in the Southern Pacific. Harriman and his banker, Jacob Schiff of Kuhn Loeb, had burning reasons to thwart Hill and Morgan.

The Burlington under Hill's control would directly threaten the UP, as its own connections to Chicago—the remaining independent “Granger roads”—would still skim off much of the profit from the long-haul traffic. Worse, a Burlington-GN-NP alliance could entirely divert much freight business away from the UP. But Morgan was the master of Wall Street; how could Harriman and Schiff hope to trump him? Their audacious plan unfolded as Morgan took his annual vacation in France. Because the Burlington itself was now out of reach, Harriman and Schiff plotted to snatch control of the Northern Pacific away from Hill. If they could acquire voting control over the NP's common and preferred shares, Harriman and Schiff could force Hill and Morgan to offer some kind of equitable compromise over the Burlington.

Larry Haeg has written the first book-length treatment of this dramatic battle. Not an academic, his career in corporate communications serves his readers well, as he tells this tale with great verve. His skill in primary research is also impressive, breaking new ground in some key areas. The book is especially good in delineating how Morgan and Schiff executed their moves and counters on the trading floors in New York and London. For example, Morgan acted through James Robert Keene, a “legendary market manipulator . . . held in fear and reverent awe throughout American finance” (p. 91). The Olympian Morgan needed Keene, but never actually met him in person, as if physical distance could separate his ends and means. Haeg's research takes us, hour by hour, onto the exchange floor as trading specialists in the Granger roads (across the Midwest wheat belt) and in the “Pacifics” (the transcontinentals) executed buy and sell orders. Soon frenzy took hold, and shares in Northern Pacific rose from $110 on May 6 to $1,000 just three days later. That huge jump had both a hidden cause (Harriman's play and Hill's defense) and an overt one, as short-selling speculators leapt in, convinced that the overvalued NP would inevitably fall. This corner on NP shares caused other stocks to plunge in value as the short sellers in NP desperately dumped their good assets to raise funds to cover a bet that would prove ruinous. In the end, Morgan and Schiff stepped in to restore order to the stock market.

Restoring stability to the map of Midwest railroading proved more difficult. Thanks to an obscure clause in fine print, Harriman and Schiff fell short in controlling the Northern Pacific—but they weren't going away. To defang those tigers, Hill and Morgan placed the shares of both the NP and the GN into the Northern Securities holding company (another side deal split joint control of the Burlington between GN and UP). Haeg carries his story onward into the formation of Northern Securities, then to its demise after President Theodore Roosevelt's antitrust prosecution won at the Supreme Court in 1904. Here the narrative gets bogged down in simplistic moralism. Having presented Hill and Harriman as railway titans—brilliant movers of people, goods, and markets—he then casts their opponents from the “so-called Progressive movement” as calculating politicians who used the Northern Securities case to unleash a “witch hunt of corporate America” (pp. 2, 281). Captive to his own free-market ideology, Haeg asserts (without intentional irony) that “class warfare against railroad owners even infected the rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court justices” in the 1890s (p. 246).

Harriman vs. Hill is a fine narrative that distorts or ignores the key analytic questions raised in that story. For thirty years, the independent Granger roads had served the transcontinentals equitably, pooling the business for much of that time. So why did Morgan (often a fan of pools) ignite an entirely predictable conflict by approving Hill's takeover of the Burlington? The question does not come up. Preferring a simple dualism in which business titans made markets while government corrupted them, Haeg never explores the really big tensions inherent in his story. Decades of work by business historians have shown that these huge corporations were simultaneously and variously the products, architects, and targets of local, state, and federal law.

The great railway titans that Haeg so admires had little use for free markets. They grew and wielded their vast systems to defeat open market competition—much to the ire of shippers, a group invisible to Haeg. And opposition to the carriers reflected their overwhelming power in shaping the livelihoods of millions, the geographies and markets of vast regions, and the political complexions of every town and state they traversed.

With scarcely a nod to these kinds of analytic complexities, Haeg's railroads are built by great men and opposed by little ones.