Posted on 10/13/2005 7:15:07 AM PDT by ZGuy
During the bleak days of the Depression, Matthew Josephson -- at that time a self-proclaimed Marxist - published a biased and mistake-packed economic history of the Gilded Age. Josephson's The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists, 1861 - 1901 hit bookstores in 1934. At the time -- in the midst of massive unemployment, historically-high industrial malaise, and all the human suffering attendant to those realities -- critics and pundits seemed eager to praise a book that damned Wall Street magnates, bankers, and millionaires generally. Thus Josephson's treatise became an influential bestseller. Thus also did men such as Jay Gould, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller -- the industrialists, investors and entrepreneurs who defined their era -- become robber barons. (The term was not one with which any of the moguls had been acquainted. Rockefeller -- the last of them, destined to die in 1937 at the age of 97 -- most likely never read Josephson's book.) Through the following decades, Josephson's volume became the bedrock for nearly all further considerations of the Gilded Age, forming the misguided track upon which several generations of scholars drove their trains.
Josephson was an unlikely Wall Street historian. Born in Brooklyn in 1899, he studied literature at Columbia University, graduating 1920. Immediately thereafter, Josephson and his bride, Hannah Geffen, went to Paris to join the then-thriving community of American expatriate writers. We find no hint of Josephson in Hemingway's letters of the period, or in Hem's memoir of those days, A Moveable Feast. Still, Josephson seems to have been somewhat prominent on the Left Bank, where he edited the literary magazine Broom (1922-1924), and wrote poetry and criticism for other small but respected journals. (Josephson chronicled these years in Life Among the Surrealists, published 1962.)
Josephson's first two books were biographies: Zola and His Time (1928) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1932). By Josephson's own account, his consideration of the muck-raking novelist Zola -- whose fictions sought to document the plight of France's underclass -- is what that turned him toward his own personal exploration of "America's vast history of economic injustice."
In The Robber Barons, Josephson presented a quintessentially Marxian analysis of enterprise. Quoting Honore de Balzac's catchy but baseless aphorism that "behind every great fortune lies a great crime," Josephson painted Gilded Age capitalism simplistically as a zero-sum game where a dollar acquired by one person was necessarily one stolen from another. As Maury Klein has observed, Josephson was at heart "a moralist who cared less about the accuracy of the story than about the ideological message he saw in it." In shaping his facts to backup his ideology, Josephson completely missed one elemental truth: The leading entrepreneurs of the Gilded Age were to the modern American economy what the founding fathers were to the Bill of Rights. These men built the infrastructure upon which the whole of their country's 20th century prosperity was based. The Carnegies, Goulds, Rockefellers and Morgans created -- and that is a key word here, created -- capacity and jobs, thus enabling the rise of that most radical and democratic of things: a strong, stable, educated middle class. By being visionaries and taking business risks that served their own ends, the Gilded Age industrialists generated new wealth not only for themselves, but for their emerging nation-state.
During the forty years that followed the Civil War, the United States amazed European investors and observers with the speed at which it morphed from a relatively backward agricultural republic to the most powerful industrial nation on the face of the planet. During the "robber baron" years, the United States outstripped other nations by far when it came to growth in per capita income, industrial production, and rising values generally. As well, the Gilded Age saw, for the first time, full economic participation by numerous previously disenfranchised constituencies. But one has a hard time gleaning these facts from Josephson's book, or from any of its numerous descendants.
Just a handful of volumes published in the wake of The Robber Barons have given the various Gilded Age moguls a fair shake. Of the dozens of biographies concerning Gould, for example, only three -- my recent Dark Genius of Wall Street (Basic Books, 2005), Maury Klein's The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (John Hopkins University Press, 1986), and Julius Grodinsky's Jay Gould: His Business Career, 1867-1892 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1957) manage to circle in upon the truth of the man and his enterprises. Similar biographical percentages apply to Gould's fellow movers and shakers. For the most part, our literature maligns the titans who pioneered American oil and coal production, built the steel mills that produced the backbones of cities, financed many thousand miles of railway, and shrunk the world with telegraphic magic.
Accurate books do get written every once in a while. But for every Ron Chernow we seem to have ten Howard Zinns. And for every reliable study concerning the founding fathers of our modern economy, we seem to have ten volumes like Zinn's popular, unreliable People's History of the United States, in which Josephson is quoted as the most reputable of sources when it comes to the "robber barons" and their various "crimes."
The latest volley in this war of words is about to be fired, and fired for our side. Look for Charles B. Morris's The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy (Times Books/Henry Holt) to hit bookstores this month. Morris, as his title suggests, gives credit where credit is due.
The writer is author of Dark Genius of Wall Street.
-- C.S Lewis
"Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy."
~ Theodore Roosevelt
Gilded Age bumperoo. Anyone else still have their "Poverty Sucks" poster from the 80s?
Part of my own personal political and economic awakening was the realization that years earlier I'd been hoodwinked and mistaught by the term "robber baron" in high school American history class.
We do need a balance re-evaluation of "Robber Barons."
While there were real problems and even crimes involved in building the great fortunes there were exaggerated by the twin forces of socialism and a generation gap unlike anything in our history to that point.
Also, the "solutions" of the era to the problems of the robber barons -unions, social security, anti-trust laws and increased government regulation have been shown to bring their own set of problems.
There is also the "Microsoft" robber baron argument to be made - that the new technology of the industrial age was going to lead to ultra powerful industrialists and like with Microsoft isn't better for the robber barons to be American reinvesting their wealth in America?
Nonetheless, a careful examination of that period will reveal abuses recognizable to modern capitalists from which we now have protection. Not all government is bad. Monopolies prevent free/fair trade.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. – C. S. Lewis
PING
Sadly, Josephson's The Robber Barons is still widely used on university campuses in history classes, teaching yet another generation of students that their country's wealth is based on crime and greed, rather than the hard work of their ancestors. If all I knew about 19th century history came from what I was taught in college, I would believe that Jay Gould was up there with John Wilkes Booth in the villian catagory.
In his "History of the American People," Paul Johnson makes the point that, in the period of second-rate presidents that ran between Lincoln and TR, all of them _combined_ did not do more to advance the standard of living of the average American than any lone man like Fisk, Morgan, Carnegie, Harriman, etc.
bookmark
"Yes, that's the CS Lewis quote that 2banana posted in reply #2.
In reply #3, I offered Teddy Roosevelt's contrasting opinion.
So what's you're point in simply repeating the Lewis quotation?"
I guess my point, to the extent I had one, was that I missed reply #2. Sorry about that.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.