The Robber Barons, The Great American Capitalists.pdf

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Matthew Josephson, Robber Barons
Robber Barons
THE
Robber Barons
THE GREAT AMERICAN CAPITALISTS
1861-1901
by
Matthew Josephson
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There are never wanting some persons
of violent and undertaking natures,
who, so they may have power and
business, will take it at any cost .
FRANCIS BACON
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HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY
NEW YORK, 1934
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FOREWORD
T HIS book attempts the history of a small class of men who arose at the time of our Civil
War and suddenly swept into power.
The members of this new ruling class were generally, and quite aptly, called “barons,”
“kings,” “empire-builders,” or even “emperors.” They were aggressive men, as were the
first feudal barons ; sometimes they were lawless ; in important crises, nearly all of them
tended to act without those established moral principles which fixed more or less the
conduct of the common people of the community. At the same time, it has been noted,
many of them showed volcanic energy and qualities of courage which, under another
economic clime, might have fitted them for immensely useful social constructions, and
rendered them glorious rather than hateful to their people. These men were robber barons
as were their medieval counterparts, the dominating figures of an aggressive economic age.
In any case, “to draw the American scene as it unfolded between the Civil War and the end
of the nineteenth century, without these dominant figures looming in the foreground, is to
make a shadow picture,” as the Beards have written. “To put in the presidents and the
leading senators . . . and leave out such prime actors in the drama is to show scant respect
for the substance of life. Why, moreover, should anyone be interested in the beginnings of
the House of a Howard or Burleigh and indifferent to the rise of a House of Morgan or
Rockefeller ?”
When the group of men who form the subject of this history arrived upon the scene, the
United States was a mercantile-agrarian democracy. When they departed or retired from
active life, it was something else : a unified industrial society, the effective economic,
control of which was lodged in the hands of a hierarchy.
In short, these men more or less knowingly played the leading rôles in an age of industrial
revolution. Even their quarrels, intrigues and misadventures (too often treated as merely
diverting or picturesque) are part of the mechanism of our history. Under their hands the
renovation of our economic life proceeded relentlessly : large-scale production replaced the
scattered, decentralized mode of production ; industrial enterprises became more
concentrated, more “efficient” technically, and essentially “coöperative,” where they had
been purely individualistic and lamentably wasteful. But all this revolutionizing effort is
branded with the motive of private gain on the part of the new captains of industry. To
organize and exploit the resources of a nation upon a gigantic scale, to regiment its farmers
and workers into harmonious corps of producers, and to do this only in the name of an
uncontrolled appetite for private profit—here surely is the great inherent contradiction
whence so much disaster, outrage and misery has flowed.
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This paradox, the germ of many future plagues, illuminates the story of industrial
concentration in the United States, which is here pursued through the study of the major
financial events and personalities between 1861 and 1901. Our inquiry is also directed
incidentally to establishing the manner in which the country’s natural resources and arteries
of trade were preëmpted, its political institutions conquered, its social philosophy turned
into a pecuniary one, by the new barons. Who were the men who seized supreme
economic power and “built up the country” while enriching themselves ? How did they
build, how did they use their power, and how did they have it sanctified by tribunes and
magistrates, churches and schools ? How much did they further progress ? And how much
catastrophe ?
Their deeds, in the last analysis, were determined by economic forces, we must remember.
Hence we have tried in so far as possible to write of them without anger, to paint them as
no more “wicked” than they or their contemporaries actually were, though we are aware
now of living in another moral climate and in the midst of a new generation which carries
the vast and onerous social responsibilities bequeathed to it.
M. J.
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F O R E W O R D : 1962
The Robber Barons was written during that Great Slump which, beginning in 1929, reached its
lowest depths in 1929-1933. The New Era of Prosperity had ended ; the captains and the
kings of industry were, some of them, departing ; and we were asking ourselves insistently
how we, as a nation, had got into such a pass ? In the twenties I had worked for a few years
in Wall Street and learned a few things about the “ Men Who Rule America ,” according to
James W. Gerard. Some time later, after 1929, I did a number of biographical studies of
them for a well-known satirical magazine. Yet, what I gathered from these experts and
from readings in our financial history led me to consider the money men of the twenties as
mere epigones compared with their mighty forebears, the economic dinosaurians who
flourished during the latter part of the nineteenth century and gave a special character to
their period, so aptly named by Mark Twain the Gilded Age . Thus the idea was conceived
of writing a history of the earlier generation of capitalists who had put their stamp so deeply
upon our business society. It was my purpose to give an account not only of their lives and
their manners and morals, but also of how they got the money.
At that season in 1933 when money itself was disappearing (all the banks having been
closed for a while) it seemed as if this whole breed might disappear, or perhaps be reformed
beyond recognition. Would such fearsome bulls and bears ever again range over the market
place as anarchs of all they surveyed ? Then, the old barons had such great panache !—with
their private “palace cars” on rails, their imitation-Renaissance castles, and their pleasure
yachts, one of which J.P. Morgan defiantly christened The Corsair . Those “kings” of
railways, those monopolists of iron or pork, moreover, founded dynastic families which
Charles A. Beard once likened to the old ducal families of feudal England.
The expanding America of the post-Civil War era was the paradise of freebooting
capitalists, untrammeled and untaxed. They demanded always a free hand in the market,
promising that in enriching themselves they would “build up the country” for the benefit of
all the people. The Americans of those days had no time for the arts of civilization, as
Henry Adams observed, but turned as with a single impulse to the huge tasks of developing
their half-empty continent, spanning it with a railway net, and constructing the heavy
industrial plant requisite for the new scale of power. All of this was achieved in a climactic
quarter-century of our industrial revolution, with much haste, much public scandal, and
without plan—under the leadership of a small class of parvenus . These were the aggressive
and acquisitive types (much censured by our classic writers and historians) who believed
they constituted “the survival of the fittest.”
Theirs is the story of a well-nigh irresistible drive toward monopoly, which the plain
citizens, Congresses, and Presidents opposed—seemingly in vain. The captains or barons
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