The journalist dipped his pen in poison and wrote: “The old robber barons (robber barons) of the Middle Ages who plundered with sword and lance in hand, were more honest than the new aristocracy of swindling millionaires.” These businessmen were like “sharks and wolves,” he said, who “will eventually devour us all.”
Who is the author about – who hid behind the pseudonym Mr. Hardhack – ranting here: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos? No. The above philippica, from The Atlantic from August 1870, is aimed at the great American industrialists of the time – men like Andrew Carnegie, JP Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt: magnates who ruthlessly imposed their will on American society and politics.
The idea of wealthy businessmen like robber barons has since been part of social discourse in the United States. Tech billionaires like Bezos (Amazon), Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, regularly labeled ‘robber knight’ when it is exposed how they run their empire and increase their political influence. That raises the question of how the original robber barons operated.
The first businessman to be characterized as such was Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877). In an article The New York Times from 1859 with the head ‘Your money or your line’ editor-in-chief Henry Raymond compares his practices with those of “the old barons” along the Rhine, the German ones Raubritter who at the end of the Middle Ages extorted tolls from passing traders.
Those who wanted to become active in the shipping industry found Vanderbilt on their way. Competitors had to pay a ‘toll’, or sell their line to him – hence the pun in the headline above the article. Raymond said it was a shame: “The man who uses his capital to terrorize his fellow citizens is a public evildoer and attracts public disapproval in proportion to his immunity from the law.”
Like Vanderbilt, about 25 men in the US at that time were making a fortune in emerging industries. Carnegie (1835-1919) made his millions in steel, Morgan (1837-1913) as a banker and Rockefeller (1839-1937) was in oil. Their heyday is known as the Gilded Age.
Tech billionaires like Bezos, Musk and Zuckerberg are regularly labeled ‘robber knights’
Politicians and laws did not stand in their way – on the contrary. Thanks to strong lobbying (which sometimes turned into corruption), they were able to go about their business unhindered. Journalist Henry Lloyd concluded in 1894 his book Wealth against Commonwealth that these tycoons “exercised power such as kings have never known.”
Perhaps, but unlike their medieval German colleagues, the American robber barons had to deal with investigative journalists such as Lloyd, who served as muckrakers have gone down in history. There was also dissatisfaction among workers and rural residents about the contrast between their own hard lives and the increase in extreme wealth among the elite in the industrial northwest of the US.
That anger found its way into movements like the Greenback Labor Party and the People’s Party – also known as the Populists – who wanted to put an end to the unbridled acquisition of power and capital by the robber baronsmade possible by the monopoly they held in their respective industries. This phase of social struggle is called the Progressive Era of American history and lasted from about 1890 to 1920.
Soon we had more too main stream politicians realized that something had to be done about the power of the richest businessmen. The progressive Republican Theodore ‘Teddy’ Roosevelt made breaking their monopolies a spearhead during his presidency (1901-1909). He reacted against it “wealth amassed on a gigantic scale through every form of injustice, from the oppression of wage laborers to unfair and unhealthy methods of crushing competition, and to defrauding the public through the manipulation of securities.”
Ultimately, the power of the business elite was broken by acts of Congress (the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act) and by Supreme Court rulings. The Supreme Court ruled in the case in 1911 ‘Standard Oil Co.’ of New Jersey v. United States’ that John D. Rockefeller’s company was an illegal monopoly and should be broken up. That’s what happened: the oil company broke up into 34 separate companies – which have since merged again to form new giants.
The robber barons Nowadays they themselves are no longer as bad as they were in their own time. Their philanthropic activities will certainly have contributed to this. They donated millions of dollars to charities such as the construction of the Peace Palace in The Hague (Carnegie), health care (Rockefeller), museums (Morgan) and universities (Vanderbilt). The term robber barons historians no longer use it, unlike opinion makers. Since the 1980s, scientists have preferred to highlight their success and business creativity.
It would be the muckrakers have been surprised. Ida Tarbell (1857-1944), considered a pioneer of this revealing, activist journalism, judged politicians of her time that they were “ignorant, corrupt and unprincipled” and had thus opened the door wide to unscrupulous entrepreneurs. Their philanthropy did not detract from this for her: “There is only one word for that: hypocrisy.”
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