Apr

5

Burton Fulsom in his book The Myth of the Robber Barrons shows that many of the great industrialists of the 19th century, the ones that didn't get government help like Harriman and Fulton, but the independent productive geniuses like James Hill, Cornelius Vaderbilt, The Mellons (My friend Dan Grossman wrote a great review of the recent Mellon bio), and the Scrantons and the Rockefellers were great men who opened up new vistas of consumer benefit and weath.

It totally disproves the myth that has the world in its grip, and things like the Palindrome who calls them crook capitalists. We know who the crook capiatalists are today, and they're not the men like Steve Jobs, and many others.

Who else would you nominate as the opposite of the cronies? Let us come up with some good ones in honor of Rocky's Humbert's request for us to honor the creation of value.

Alston Mabry writes:

Deng Xiaoping and John Doerr.

Also here is something interesting from the original foreword to The Robber Barons, by Matthew Josephson, first published in 1934:

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.

…and from the Foreword to the 1962 edition:

In the crisis years of the 1930s economic intervention by the Federal Government was employed on an unprecedented scale, not only in the interests of human welfare, but also to regulate and control the masters of capital who, by their excesses and bad leadership, had helped to bring about the debacle of 1929-1933. At that period a critical literature also arose (of which the present work may perhaps be taken as an example), providing background material to the men of the New Deal.

Of late years, however, a group of academic historians have constituted themselves what may be called a revisionist school, which reacts against the critical spirit of the 1930s. They reject the idea that our nineteenth-century barons-of-the-bags may have been inspired by the same motives animating the ancient barons-of-the-crags—who, by force of arms, instead of corporate combinations, monopolized strategic valley roads or mountain passes through which commerce flowed. To the revisionists of our history our old-time moneylords "were not robber barons but architects of material progress," and, in some wise, "saviors" of our country. They have proposed rewriting parts of America's history so that the image of the old-school capitalists should be retouched and restored, like rare pieces of antique furniture. This business of rewriting our history — perhaps in conformity to current fashions in intellectual reaction — has unpleasant connotations to my mind, recalling the propaganda schemes used in authoritarian societies and the "truth factories" in George Orwell's anti-utopian novel 1984. 

Sam Marx writes:

Every time I'm in NYC going up the ramp at Park Ave So. I see the statue of Cornelius Vanderbilt and I'm reminded of how he created a shortcut to California by way of Panama.

After the California '49 discovery of gold, increasing the migration there, he cleared that thin strip of land in Panama, placed boats on the Pacific side and transported passengers by boat from NYC to Panama, horse and wagon to the Pacific and then by boat to California, thereby saving the long and dangerous trip across country or around South America. No robber baron in that endeavor.

Pitt T. Maner III writes: 

How about Ray Kroc? McDonalds in the news for hiring 50,000 new employees this month.

Kroc created a new kind of fast food with McDonald's, implementing Henry Ford's assembly line idea into his restaurants. He also utilized standardization, a business tactic that he used to make sure that every Big Mac would taste the same whether a person is in New York or Tokyo. Kroc also revolutionized the art of franchising, where he set strict rules on how the food was to be made. These strict rules also were applied to customer service standards with such mandates that moneys be refunded to clients whose orders were not correct or to customers who had to wait for more than 5 minutes for their food. However, Kroc let the franchisees decide their best approach to marketing the products. For example, Willard Scott created the internationally recognized figure known as Ronald McDonald to improve sales of hamburgers in the Washington, D.C. area. Kroc established various foundations for alcoholics, and also started the Ronald McDonald House foundation.

Jeff Sasmor writes:

A later Vanderbilt created one of the first concrete roads in the nation, the Vanderbilt Motor Parkway . Some remnants remain, my wife and I used to bike on a part of it that I believe still remains between Cunningham Park and Creedmore hospital in Queens NYC.

Allegedly the VMP was the first road designed for autos only.

A much later Vanderbilt, a great^n granddaughter, used to work for me and my partners in the early 1990s, but got fired because the wife of one of my partners got jealous of her good looks.

Jeff Watson writes: 

Jay Gould was my favorite robber-baron, although he was deeply flawed, and a vile and disgusting cheat. One could say that Gould had an inner drive and a pronounced sense of pluck. Getting his speculative stake from the ashes of the Panic of 1857, he astounded the financial world with his decades of manipulations. His railroad corners were amazing. His attempt to corner the gold market resulting in Black Friday was something out of a novel, His bribery to influence legislation was legendary. His chicanery with using forged stock certificates set the bar for all other cheats and swindlers. He controlled Western Union. His corners in the Chicago commodities markets were equal to those of Armour, Cutten, and Gates.. As bad as he was, he still managed to combine a bunch of railroads together and creating value by achieving a better operating scale. I have problems with the way he treated the help, but at that time, laborers were very shabbily treated. Finally, when Gould died, he had an estate of $75 million dollars, so he must have done something right.


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1 Comment so far

  1. jeff Watson on April 6, 2011 8:26 am

    Henry Clews did a great job of describing the Robber Barons. Here’s a pdf copy of his book. http://tinyurl.com/3jx8lon

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