One Summer: America, 1927

titans America produced in the 1910s and ’20s, none were more extraordinary or are now more forgotten. Born into modest but respectable circumstances in Cleveland – their father was a bookkeeper – they started off as small-time property developers, but they plugged away and branched out into other areas until by the 1920s they were two of the richest men in America. They were also by a long shot two of the strangest.
    No one knew where their unusual first names came from. Their parents had evidently just liked the sounds and made names out of them. The brothers were pale and small and inseparable. In the words of their biographer, they were ‘almost wholly dependent on each other’. They lived in a fifty-four-room mansion but sleptside by side in twin beds in the master bedroom. They didn’t smoke, drink or stay up late. They were pathologically shy. They took no part in public life and avoided having their pictures taken. They never named any of their projects after themselves. They didn’t attend the topping-out ceremony for the Union Terminal on 18 August or the dinner afterwards.
    Oris was three years older than Mantis, but was very much the junior partner of the relationship. Mantis essentially ran his life for him – packed his bags, looked after his pocket money, kept track of his appointments. Oris slept a great deal; twelve hours a night was usual. Mantis sometimes rode horses, but otherwise neither had any known interests. They never took holidays.
    Their estate, called Daisy Hill, spread over 477 acres. The house had eighty telephone lines to keep them in touch with their business empire. Among the other rooms in the house were two dining rooms where no guest was ever entertained, a gym that was forever undisturbed, and twenty-three bedrooms that never received a visitor. They had no friendships, though Mantis did eventually fall for a widow named Mary Snow and enjoyed a relationship with her, which he somehow kept secret from Oris. A field on the property was used sometimes for polo matches and more occasionally as an airstrip. According to the brothers’ biographer, Herbert H. Harwood, Jr, Charles Lindbergh landed there once and gave Mantis a ride while Oris remained on the ground and fretted, but Harwood didn’t say when this was. It wasn’t the summer of 1927.
    If Mantis didn’t invent the leveraged buyout, he became one of its first great masters. Essentially the brothers borrowed heavily to acquire a business, then used existing businesses as collateral to borrow and acquire still more. The enterprise was a tangled network of interconnected holdings, which by the late 1920s consisted of 275 separate subsidiaries. They had so many companies that they struggled to come up with original names for them all, so that, for instance, they owned a Cleveland Terminals Building Company, aTerminal Building Company and a Terminal Hotels Company. They bought the Nickel Plate Railroad for $8.5 million, but put up just $355,000 of their own money – and all of that was borrowed from the Guardian Bank of Cleveland (which eventually went out of business without being repaid a penny). They had built this colossus with a personal investment of less than $20 million, nearly all of it borrowed. Nobody did leveraged buyouts better than the Van Sweringens.
    Mantis’s real passion, however, was railways. The industry was incredibly fragmented: in 1920, America had almost 1,100 different railway companies. Many lines went from nowhere much to nowhere much, either because the towns or industries along the way never developed as expected or because the original builders never managed to extend the lines to the main metropolises. The Lake Erie & Western ran from Sandusky, Ohio, to Peoria, Illinois; the Pere Marquette wandered confusedly around the upper Midwest, as if looking for a lost item. These forlorn lines – ‘orphans’ as they were known in the trade – were generally pretty easy to acquire and the Van Sweringens did so with enthusiasm. They loved to acquire railways.
    Within eight years the pair had built up the third largest railway empire in the country. By 1927 they controlled almost 30,000 miles of rail line, about 11 per cent of the national total, with routes stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to Salt Lake City. Along the way they also scooped up warehouses, ferries and the Greenbrier resort hotel in West Virginia. At their peak, they had 100,000 employees and assets of between $2 billion and