With the recent celebration of Samuel Colt’s 200th birthday, we should ask: How good a businessman would he be considered today? Colt is well known as a wizard of manufacturing and an “up by his bootstraps” success story. The business yardstick is still profit, but when is the price too high?
Like the Halliburton company, Colt was accused of profiting from war. He sent arms to the South after the Civil War began, and then he charged the U.S. Army 10 percent more than he charged the confederate states.
Like the Koch brothers, his contemporaries accused him of voter suppression. Colt fired anti-slavery partisans from his factory. He had an aide watch as his workers filled out ballots in the general elections.
Colt was ethically challenged in other ways: As with the current CalPERS pension scandal, bribery was a way to get ahead. Although he was acquitted of the charge of bribing Congress in 1854, Colt was back in Washington in 1859 to buy votes for a patent extension. He promised he was “willing to pay handsome contingent fees [and] bend myself to pay in all $50,000…when the patent extension has become law.”
Today, that $50,000 is worth about $1 million. Colt specified that it should be split equally between Republicans and Democrats.
Does a good army officer make a good businessman? Not in Colt’s case: He was a terrible military leader. He started to build an unofficial army (with him as the sole command), so to keep him under control, Gov. William Buckingham made him a colonel. Colt told his recruits that once they signed up, they had to stay in his army for five years — far longer than the real army’s requirement.
He insisted that all his soldiers had to be at least 5′ 7”, a height he totally made up. This excluded a number of qualified men, including some irate firemen from New Haven. Colonel Colt never saw battle. He was quickly stripped of his military responsibilities.
And talk about imperial overreach: Colt began his thirst to rule with “Coltsville,” a company town controlled by him from the bottom up. It had a library, sure, but what good is that to a worker who is kicked out of the company housing? He graduated to buying an entire town — Lama, Texas — sometime in June, 1861. Texas was a slave state at the time, at war with the United States.
Colt’s biggest land grab was international in scope. Colt historians note that the millionaire gunmaker and some southern politicians aided Narcisco Lopez, a soldier of fortune who invaded Cuba twice in 1850-51, to “liberate” it, possibly so it could become a slave state. In any case, it would have been a new market for Colt’s weapons trade.
Finally, there is the delicate issue of Colt’s death. Moral weakness has a way of seeping into company business. Depending on the accounts, the cause of Colt’s death was either rheumatic fever (serious if not treated, but not fatal), stress from overwork (although he and his family vacationed in Martha’s Vineyard, Maryland, Havana, Europe), gout (chronic but not fatal), or gout plus a slight cold that went to his brain. The only type of ‘gout’ that goes to the brain is Spanish gout, a euphemism for syphilis. In a 2007 interview, however, one historian firmly stated that the syphilis rumor “is almost certainly not true.”
Yes, Colt gets high marks for being a highly successful businessman and a great self-promoter. But his story reads like the worst excesses of 21st century capitalism rolled into one. Maybe Colt might have benefitted from the advice of Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat who recently told his employees, “There is no greater risk to our institution and our industry than ethical lapses.”
Steve Thornton is a union organizer and long-time Hartford resident who writes on local history.
