Overwhelmed With Good Fortune
By Graydon M. Meints

Billy Vanderbilt suffered from spectacularly bad press during the period he battled Henry Tyler. At right, the mogul is shown as an engine marked "MONOPOLY" choking Miss Liberty with a belt of railway track.

Below, even after his death in 1885, stricken while conferring with B&O President Robert Garrett, the phrase attributed to him—"The public be damned"—lived on in the American imagination.

The Bettmann Archive