The Myth Of The Robber Barons

James Buchanan Duke was a tobacco and electric power industrialist in the mid-1800s and early 1900s. Duke would not be considered a robber baron due to the fact that he took advantage of the opportunity to sell his own tobacco after the Civil War was over and the tobacco business wasn’t thriving. He also did so without being evil or dishonest.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was born with some wealth from his father, who was a ferry owner, he made quite a bit of money from it too. When he was younger he joined his father, watching his ways and learning them too. In Vanderbilt’s teen years, he bought his first ferry, which was the start of his big successful business life. He was very,very smart with money, he knew how to get it but he didn’t know how to use it. He grew up to own many steamships and he became the country’s largest steamship owner, then he later in life put all of his riches towards railroads, and he had railroads all across the nation leading from place to place, making money by the minute, because of his success in the railroad business, he became the richest man in the nation. So in a way, Vanderbilt was a captain of industry but he was majority a robber baron.

Vanderbilt was a Robber Baron. He stepped on people, stabbed them in the back, and did lots of other things to get where he was. He was the most powerful man in the country. He owned most of the railroads. He wanted them all of them though.

Well while reading Tipple’s essay, at first I was kind of confused because I was thinking that Robber Barons did not seem like too bad of a group. In the beginning, Tipple was not providing enough examples to make me, as the reader, automatically agree with his opinion. However, reading further into it, his points became clearer. He began to provide more examples and really explain. For instance, he stated how the railroads were cheating people and were gaining interest from it. Also along with his examples he told how these big businessmen actually felt about what they were doing. None of them even cared! Heck, Vanderbilt wondered what he needed to care about the laws for, “Hain’t I got the power?” he asked. Now I’m thinking that these people are way out of line and are too greedy for their own good. What they were doing was not fair. Of course they received great benefits from it, but what about the common people? They were still practically living in poverty, being ripped out of money because these businessmen were so darn greedy. So Tipple gave very strong points throughout his entire

Nineteenth century was the golden time of the United States, author Mark Twain named this period of time: Gilded Age. There was a fast-quick way to get rich, which could be told from the success of Andrew Carnegie, who owned the empire of steel, and John D. Rockefeller, who was the king of his oil kingdom, but also made many people suffer from their wealth, and some of them faced bankrupt because of the promising lure. The power boom of industrialists made the rich happy, and made the poor sad. The Supreme Court stood with the rich, but apparently some groups did not like the forced monopoly game, they tried to fight back. Unfortunately, this game has not stopped yet, America is finding a way to shift the economic justice today.

America was once seen as a post Civil War wasteland. The country looked as if it were a failed experiment in democracy and no one knew what lied ahead for America. Half a century after the Civil War and its destruction, it was being rebuilt by witty businessmen like Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller. The risky entrepreneurial skills the men possessed led America on a path to become the greatest superpower in the world. While Vanderbilt controlled the majority of railways in the United States, Rockefeller controlled the majority of oil in the U.S. and had a large impact on future innovations. Their contributions in society helped the American Industry produce more goods than were ever thought possible before their time. Cornelius Vanderbilt and John D. Rockefeller gave Americans a new vision for society by giving rise to entrepreneurs and developing industry in their own astute way.

After the American Civil War, a laissez-faire government allowed for a new class of businessmen to rise to power: those who dominated an entire industry, sometimes several markets. They were the hallmark of the so-called Gilded Age, which lasted from the end of reconstruction until the early 1900s. These men, known as Robber Barons, shaped the American economy, necessitating new laws to be signed to limit their power . Although there were only four main Barons (John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and J.P. Morgan), they controlled much of the economy with their four respective trades: Oil, steel, railroads, and banking . Although all four were important, Rockefeller and Carnegie stand head and shoulders above the rest, becoming among the richest and most successful people the world has ever seen with the exception of some royalty.

In progress and poverty by Henry George the ever widening gap between the rich and poor is acknowledged. “The wealthy class is becoming more wealthy; but the poorer class is becoming more dependent” (Doc A). His writing displays the unfairness that was associated with wealthy industrialists. A small portion of wealthy businessmen were controlling all of America. This unfairness is further shown in the political cartoon The Robber Barons of Today. This cartoon published by the Granger collection highlights the plight of the poor laborers at the mercy of wealthy industrialists who control trusts and monopolize the public. The cartoon stresses its point as the workers desperately hand over bags to the industrialists that say taxes, wages, and

“The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them”. This quote by Eda B. Wells reminds us that now is the time to shine the light upon these unfair business practices of robber barons. The early industrialists of the 19th century were robber barons. Despite their wealth and personal success, these people harmed our society. Robber barons negatively impacted society for two main reasons: their success took away the law of competition and also caused the government to be out of the people’s control.

The Industrial economy had a rapid growth with the increase of factory production, especially in the North and West. By 1913, the U.S made one third of the world’s industrial production. Most of this manufacturing took place in the large cities. With the growth of population, came the need for mass production, mass distribution, and mass marketing of goods. Businesses started to grow and engaging in ruthless competition. The marketplace was so chaotic that they formed pools that divided up markets between supposedly competing firms and fixed prices. This is when they formed the trusts, so the matters of rival companies were managed by one sole director. With this came the growth of national chains and they started to eat up the smaller companies. Andrew Carnegie who led the steel world and John Rockefeller who owned 90 percent of the nation’s oil industry controlled major amounts of the economy. Business men like Carnegie and Rockefeller were knows as robber barons because they got rich through ruthless business deals and exploiting workers.

The 19th century, the industrial revolution. These were times times of new manufacturing processes. The time of captains of the industries. Entrepreneurs, people who organize and operate a business or businesses while taking on greater than normal financial risks in order to do so, dominated with wealth. However they ruled with social respect. These powerful men were mistaken for robber-barons, unscrupulous plutocrats that gain a fortune through ruthless means. However, through proof of treatment to workers, their effect in politics, and their distribution of wealth; entrepreneurs are not robber barons.

This paper will be concentrated on the stock market and a few different people that gained tremendous wealth and power from it. Jordan Belfort, Bernard Madoff, and the Enron Company are prime examples of people who had acquired both wealth and power all coming through the stock market, but not exactly legally through the entirety of their careers. In multiple cases, unfortunate events and choices that took place in their lives led to the loss of a tremendous amount of money for a lot of people, which eventually led to their downfall.

Robber Barons is a phrase used by historians that describes industrialists in the late 1800’s. A Robber Baron is a powerful industrialist.

This paper describes about a firm called Lehman Brothers and how their high-risk culture and questionable deals contributed to their declaration of Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 15, 2008. Some of Lehman’s main reasons to declare bankruptcy was their highly risky business model that required it to raise billions of dollars per day to keep their operations going (Wiggins, Piontek, Metrick, 2014, p.1). Another reason was their leadership who encouraged the risky culture of the firm and operating an accounting device name Repo 105 to keep assets off its balance sheet so it may appear that the firm was not borrowing that much money (Robbins, 2016, pg. 178). The firm was able to do this because around the 2000s, there was a deregulation of the financial industry that made it easier to do more financial projects such as proprietary trading, subprime mortgages, and real estate market (Wiggins, et al, 2014, p.4-5). Which made the firm very successful until the financial crises happened and Lehman was not able to secure any more funding to keep its operations running causing it to declare bankruptcy. The rest of this paper will go into detail about Lehman Brothers tactics on how it got rich quick from the financial market and how their actions contributed to their downfall.

The late 18th and early 19th centuries are often characterized by how they were dominated by extremely wealthy people who established a name for themselves by exploiting the current state that the nation was in after the Reconstruction. This period is marked not only by the increase in Monopolies and Trusts as well as the brewing conflict between the wealthy and the poor specifically the business owners and the farmers but by the industrial growth and blossoming of the American economy. However, the individuals who were at the forefront during the Gilded Age such as Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller should be referred to Robber Baron’s as the name captures their deceitful nature, greediness, and thirst for power.