Matthew Josephson, Robber Barons Robber Barons THE Robber Barons Foreword 1962 Foreword THE GREAT AMERICAN CAPITALISTS ● National Scene 1861-1901 ● Young Man Dream by ● Empire Builders ● Winning West Matthew Josephson ● Captains Industry There are never wanting some persons ● Fight for Erie of violent and undertaking natures, ● Grandeurs who, so they may have power and Empire business, will take it at any cost. ● Rising from Ruins FRANCIS BACON ● Mephistopheles ● Caesar Borgia HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY ● Giants of NEW YORK, 1934 Northwest ● Certain Industrialists ● Morgan and Railways ● Robber Barons ● Again Robber Barons ● Great Trusts ● Empire of Morgan ● Battle of Giants http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/josephson/josephson_index.html5.4.2006 10:22:57 Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons FOREWORD THIS 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. http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/josephson/fw.html (1 of 2)5.4.2006 10:23:00 Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons 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. http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/josephson/fw.html (2 of 2)5.4.2006 10:23:00 Matthew Josephson, Robber Barons 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 http://yamaguchy.netfirms.com/josephson/62_fw.html (1 of 3)5.4.2006 10:23:02 Matthew Josephson, Robber Barons of industry were, nevertheless, agents of progress—in the words of their contemporary Marx ; under their command our mainly agrarian-mercantile society was swiftly transformed in a mass-production economy. I have tried to give a candid description their most ruthless actions, their conspiracies and their plunderings ; for they accepted no ethics of business conduct ; but I have also spoken their constructive virtues, and sought to picture them as human beings living in their time. 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.