The train to which he was attached had just arrived in Chicago from Michigan City, Indiana but before he could pick up his fork a brash young reporter, freelancer Clarence Dresser, burst into his car asking for an interview.  He wanted to know the railroads's guidelines for establishing freight rates.

"I'll talk to you after supper," William Henry Vanderbilt told him.

"But I have a deadline to meet," Dresser persisted, "and the public has a right to know."

"The public be damned!  Get out!"

In this one unfortunate outburst Dresser already had more than he could ever have dreamed of getting.

Dresser tried to sell the encounter to the Chicago Daily News, but the night editor "was not interested in words provoked from a man whose patience and privacy has been assaulted."  Dresser then rewrote the story and sold it to the Chicago Tribune. Here is what they printed:

"Does your limited express [between New York and Chicago] pay?" Dresser asked.

"No, not a bit of it. We only run it because we are forced to do so by the action of the Pennsylvania Road. It doesn't pay expenses. We would abandon it if it was not for our competitor keeping its train on."

"But don't you run it for the public benefit?"

"The public be damned. What does the public care for the railroads except to get as much out of them for as small a consideration as possible. I don't take any stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody's good but our own, because we are not. When we make a move we do it because it is our interest to do so, not because we expect to do somebody else some good. Of course we like to do everything possible for the benefit of humanity in general, but when we do we first see that we are benefiting ourselves. . ."

There are many variations of the story but in all of them William Henry is credited with the impolitic exclamation that has hung over Western capitalism like a Sword of Damocles ever since.  Before his death in 1885 his estimated self-worth was $194 million, roughly equal to $6,168 million today.

Adam Smith said something similar but not nearly as incriminating in his 1776 magnum opus The Wealth of Nations when he famously wrote:

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.

Vanderbilt's phrase "When we make a move we do it because it is our interest to do so" is an instance of the reality Smith describes as "their regard to their own interest."