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Under this anomaly of the law, the trust companies rose rapidly to financial eminence. Their progress was bitterly contested by the banks, but under the leadership of Frederic P. Olcott, the trust companies became so powerful that they were taken into the oligarchy before the laws were finally revised, placing them on a parity with the banks. Olcott, as president of the Central Trust Company, had a hand in nearly every one of the reorganizations of the railroads, a process through which almost every railroad in the country was carried during the period from 1878 to 1890. This experience had made Olcott an expert in every detail of railroad finance, and his rugged honesty, his utter fearlessness, his profane disregard of any man’s importance, no matter how much it might have awed others, had placed him at the front as a power to be reckoned with under all conditions.

So much for the bankers. The insurance companies were the other great powers in the financial oligarchy. Hyde of the Equitable, McCurdy of the Mutual, McCall of the New York Life—each of these men controlled the lending of hundreds of millions of dollars of money taken in as premiums. Before the eyes of each was laid the dazzling opportunity of using this power to further speculative financing of industry with the prospect of enormous profits. Some succumbed to these temptations, and used some of this money, which was entrusted to them for the most sacred of all financial purposes—the payments of death benefits to the families of policy holders—as if they had been their own funds to be risked in private speculation.