Robber Barons!

The robber barons were not a group of evil super villains. OR WERE THEY? Learn all about these titans of industry from the Gilded Age in today's episode.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello friends, we have a book coming out finally and
it is awesome. You're gonna make me say the title again. Yeah, fine,
it's Stuff you Should Know colon An Incomplete Compendium of
mostly interesting Things. And get this chuck. You don't have
to wait to order until the book comes out. You
can do what we in the book biz called pre

(00:21):
ordering it, and then when it does come out, you'll
be the first to get it, or among the first. Well.
And not only that, you get a pre order gift,
you get this cool custom poster from the illustrator of
the book, Carli Monardo, who is awesome. We worked with
another great writer who helped us out with this thing
a great deal. His name is Nils Parker, and it
was just a big team effort and it's really really cool.

(00:43):
We love how it's turning out. Yeah, we do. So
anywhere you can buy books, you can go pre order
the Stuff you Should Know Colon An Incomplete Compendium of
mostly Interesting Things, and then after you do you can
go on over to stuff you Should read books dot
com and upload your receipt and get that order poster.
So thank you in advance for everybody who is pre ordering.

(01:04):
That means quite a bit to us, and we appreciate you.
Stuff you should read Books dot Com pre order. Now
welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chucker's Bryant over there.

(01:28):
Jerry was just here doing the COVID set up and
then got out of the room really quick, held her
breath for five straight minutes. It's a new record, it really,
It's a new studio record. Sure. Uh, and this is
stuff you should know. That's that's no David Blaine record,
by the way. No, I mean that's our studio record.
You should see her when she's pearl diving though, right,

(01:51):
wouldn't that be something If Jerry did have a secret
life pearl diving, that would be amazing, it would um.
But we're not talking about Jerry Chuck enough about her. Instead,
I propose that we have a nice, pleasant conversation about
robber barons. Yeah, this is an interesting topic because depending

(02:12):
on who you ask, the robber barons were either the
greatest thing to ever happen to this country, right, or
one of the worst things to ever happen to this country. Yeah. Yeah,
And at first, from what I could tell, historians, like
immediately after in the like a few decades after UM,

(02:33):
the Gilded Age, which we'll talk about where the you know,
the age the robber barons worked and operated and lived
in UM really took it to be like their their presence,
their existence was one of the worst things ever. But
over time there's kind of been a reformation of them,
you know, kind of like a revisiting of them that
has tried to to to revive their images or actually

(02:55):
make their images possibly better than it ever has been. Yeah,
I mean it kind of I think a lot that
this has to probably depends on what you feel about,
you know, capitalism to this extent where kind of doesn't
matter how you make your money, if it's sort of
underhanded and you sort of undercut competitors and monopolize things,

(03:17):
that's all just free trade man, free capitalism, and that's
how it works out. And then those guys ton of
gave a ton of money to society before they died,
and so they that's that's all. Uh, that in justifies
the means. Yeah, I actually that Yeah, that's the conservative
way to look at it. UM. And I ran across

(03:40):
something camera was called, but it's basically, oh, human imperfection.
Did you know that the idea that humans are imperfect
and there's really no reason to try to make a
perfect society because it will always be imperfect and in
ruin um that that is a corner stone, a hallmark

(04:01):
of conservativism. Did you know that? Uh? I didn't, But
I mean, of course you can't make a perfect society.
That makes sense. Well there, what so conservatives are saying
that in opposition to all of the liberal um efforts
to make a perfect society, to have government regulation that
says no, no, we should all have clean water and

(04:22):
we should do it at the expense of making corporations
clean up the waste water before they they release their
waste into the the shared common water resources. Things like that, right,
And that there's this idea that you can you can
mold society into some perfect form, that that's the opposite

(04:42):
of human imperfection, that that's like what liberals think, and
that that is that right there is one of the
main dividing lines between conservative and liberal. I've been on
the planet for almost forty four years now, and I
had no idea that it was just that simple, and
it really kind of this. I think the word perfect
is what's a stumbling block for me because I don't

(05:04):
know a single liberal thinks that they can make things perfect.
I think the goal is to make things better. Yeah, yeah, agreed.
I don't know that it's it's a great word either,
but I think that that's you know, I mean, hey,
you're gonna argue with the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy, I'm not.
I'll bring it on, man, I'll punch that thing right
in the face. Speaking of Stanford, did you know that

(05:24):
Stanford University was named Yeah, a robber Baron named Leland Stanford. Actually, yeah,
a lot of universities are named after robber Baron's. Yeah.
There's a lot of problems with some of the early
histories of of universities, as we'll find out in the
coming weeks. So we should get into the gilded Age.
We should hop in the old way back machine, because

(05:45):
that's the age that we're talking about. And when you
hear guilded age, it might sound really great because I mean,
what's better than a gilded I don't know, toilet gilded lily.
Isn't that another one? That another thing people guild. I
don't know. That's a pretty good band name though, Gilded Lily, Yeah,

(06:07):
like a nineties power pop. Oh, totally, you nailed it.
Not said what about breakfast, said Tiffany's. But the Gilded
Age is. And Dave Russe helped us put this together,
and he points out it's not a term of endearment.
When something is gilded, that means it's it's got a
thin coating of gold, but underneath it's you know, it

(06:27):
could be a gilded tird. Sure, I hate that word
so much. I love it. It's so great. Yeah, I
mean I hate I love it and how awful it is,
Oh gotcha, But I think it's so awful it like
comes out on the other side is just plain old
awful to me. So um, yeah, that's the that's the

(06:50):
idea of the guilded Age, that it looked great on
the outside, but on the inside it wasn't so great,
and when it was so This was the second half
of the nineteenth century, basically from pretty much the end
of the Civil War up until the first decade of
the twentieth century, and it was characterized by a huge,

(07:11):
massive shift in the American economy where I saw somewhere
that at some point in the eighteen sixties to some
point in the early eighteen eighties and about fifteen years,
the American economy doubled doubled in size in fifteen years.
That's how massive it was, and that's how fast it happened.

(07:31):
And what it was was a transition from an agrarian
society to an industrial society. And it happened virtually overnight
as far as history goes. Yeah, and it was because
it happened so quickly and because it was such growth,
I think the government was like, we're going to stay
out of this and kind of just let you your

(07:53):
dudes do what you're gonna do. No regulation. Uh, you
can be as competitive as you want to be, and
you can satisfy scratch every capitalist it you want, and
we're just gonna let that happen because we're also kind
of getting rich on the side. Right, So that kind
of raises something that I saw is that the idea
that that it's kind of like a myth of the

(08:14):
las a fair government. During this era, they were definitely
las fair when it comes to regulation and letting corporatists
run rough shot over labor. But they were anything butt
hands off when it came to corporate welfare and political
entrepreneurship and helping out the wealthy class at the expense

(08:35):
of the people in general. So in one hand, on
one hand, they were las fair, on the other they
were not. Yeah, and what we're talking about here is
uh stuff like um snatching up resources where you could
hoarding them for yourself under like building such a massive
business that you could drive out every other smaller business, Uh,

(08:57):
drive them right out of business by undercutting prices. Uh,
jobs were more scarce, so you could have people work
harder for less and less wages. That kind of thing,
right exactly. And what's crazy, Like it was a dog
eat dog economy. Um, it was just nuts how it happened.

(09:18):
And there was a lot of like learning on the fly,
and the learning curve was extremely steep because I mean
this was just basically a country of farmers who had
been you know, looked down upon by Europe for a
century or more, and they all of a sudden were
captains of industry, and the most ruthless among them were

(09:40):
the ones that rose to the top. Because, like you're saying,
there was no rules, there was no regulation, there weren't
any standards of business. They were all figuring it out
as they were going along, and they went immediately to
the worst impulses that capitalism can can raise in a
person when you're in pursuit of as much possible wealth
as you can get, and there's plenty of it to

(10:01):
be had. And then, like you're saying, not only did
the federal government not get involved, they weren't equipped to
get involved because at that point, most of the government
was focused on local stuff. And now all of a sudden,
as as the United States is truly becoming a continent
wide nation, um, the federal government is kind of lagging

(10:21):
behind to catch up. It wouldn't really begin to catch
up in the progressive era. And some would say that
the pendulum swung the exact opposite way to the exact
opposite extreme direction that it had during the guilded Age. Yeah,
I mean, let's let's talk about the guilded Age and
the I guess just you owe it all the trains
really and trains you owe to steal, so you gotta

(10:42):
go back a little bit. Uh. Steel was a very
big deal, uh in that when they found out Mr
Henry Bessemer in the eighteen fifties found out how to
make steal like a lot cheaper. He got a new
process going where it was just like a making vast
amounts of steel for a fraction at the cost and speed,

(11:04):
and all of a sudden, you could open up those
local rail lines to stretch across the country and all
these regional, um specialty businesses and industries, whether it was uh,
you know, Cincinnati was known for furniture, and obviously in
places like Wyoming you had coal, and you had copper
and Montana and you had a lot of timber and Oregon.

(11:26):
You could get that stuff anywhere you wanted to go,
and that changed everything. Yeah, not only could you get
it to where you wanted to go, you could do
it exponentially cheaper than it used to be overland or
stay using canals, and then also way faster too. So
now if you were making like really great arm chairs
and Cincinnati, like you were saying, like, not only did

(11:49):
you have the town that they're just known for it,
that's their mascot, I believe of the baseball team sitters right, Um,
not only did you have the town of Cincinnati and
maybe some other regional parts of Ohio as your market
you know, hawd the entire country to supply with chairs,
and that that happened at a really great time, the

(12:09):
steel coming along and building the railroads, because the United
States economic engine was kind of idoling a really high
rpm for a little while before this. Apparently the War
of eighteen twelve caused the United States to kind of
stop relying on Europe and turn inward and become much
more self reliant than it had been before. So it

(12:29):
started to exploit more industry and resources rather than rely
on imports from Europe. That was a big one. And then, um,
the Civil War had brought a lot of factories online
in the North that hadn't been there before, and so
when the Civil War ended, these factories were all ready
to go. And with the abundance of plentiful steel, that

(12:49):
that that that engine got put into gear and it
just kind of took off like a rocket. Yeah. When
I was reading this and I tried to find out,
but I couldn't really get a firm hold. I wondered
if back then, when this started to happen, you know
how people rail against global trade and the globalization. I
wonder if people railed against nationalization of commerce back then

(13:12):
or if they all just thought it was all great. No. No.
But one of the things I read about that's actually
a mark in favor of the Gilded Age being uh,
actually a good thing for America is that people everyday
people were super involved in politics and the political process
and agitating for what they wanted. And so if there

(13:34):
were people who were definitely in favor of this kind
of just taking off like a rocket, knitting the country together,
that kind of stuff, nationalization, then there was definitely opposition
parties to that too who saw the problems with it.
But the cool thing is is that everybody was involved
in Everybody was like like like they cared about the
direction the country was going, rather than just sitting back

(13:56):
and being like, well, nothing we can do about it.
I wonder though, if it was like if there were business,
like if they were furniture makers in Cincinnati going, I
don't want to sell my chairs out there. That is
not what they said like in Cincinnati. Is that not
the Cincinnati accident? No, Okay, I might be thinking of Maine, right,

(14:17):
But I wonder if I wonder who was opposing it.
I don't know, I don't know. I haven't seen that one.
Some of the things that I saw where one of
the big fights was over currency and whether it should
remain on the gold standard or whether it should be
easy money, which, of course the so the farmers wanted.
I think they wanted easy money. I can't remember who

(14:38):
wanted to stay on the gold standard and others wanted,
you know, um basically, to to leave the gold standard
and make money a lot more um easy to come by.
The runny Dangerfield movie. That was an easy easy money. Man.
That's a tawdry movie, wasn't it. Yeah, that's good though. Yeah, hey,

(15:01):
even the worst danger Field movie still pretty great. And
on that point real quick, I'm sorry, Um. I know
we don't like to go off on tangents very often. Um,
but I have been watching Happy Days, I mean surely lately. Man.
That is some comfort food, isn't it, Dude? They are?
But not only that, it's not like junk food though.

(15:22):
They're like well written, well acted, well directed TV shows.
Like really, it's not at all like throwaway or disposable.
It doesn't rely on slick special effects or anything like that.
It's just good stuff. Man. Yeah, I agree, And you
know what, since we're on this tangent, we should tell
everyone that we're writing a book and it's coming out
this fall. Yeah, it's called Stuff you Should Know, an

(15:45):
incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And you can preorder
it now if you want a special system poster. Yeah,
you preorder it and you can go and upload your
receipt at stuff you Should Read books dot com and
then there's like a little thing that says like your
pre order gift, and you upload a picture of your
seat and they mail it to you and you will
be very happy with it because it's pretty awesome. Yeah,

(16:07):
and we want to sell We do want to sell
these books out there. We want to sell these books
all over the world. Yes, we're glad that the railroad
exists so we can move these books around easily. Oh man,
you make kidding. Ship these things to Cincinnata, right, So
where were we So we were shipping things regional businesses.

(16:28):
We're becoming national businesses. People were leaving the farms, they
were leaving small towns. They were going to the big city.
Immigrants were pouring in from Europe. African Americans were going
north because reconstruction didn't work out so well, because it
was not abandoned. Yeah, yeah, have we done one on reconstruction. No, no,
we really need to though totally. I mean the more

(16:50):
I've been I've been reading a lot about that that
period in history, and yes, we need to definitely do
one on that. But the point is there are a
lot of people flocking to work this uh, what was
called the Second Industrial Revolution where we saw a a
period of about forty years, factory output went from one
point nine billion to thirteen billion dollars, right, I mean,

(17:12):
like this happened like almost overnight. It's it's astounding how
fast this happened. Um, I don't think it even happened
this fast in the First Industrial Revolution, you know, the
one that that um started over in Manchester. Like I
think that it's this is nothing like this has ever
happened in the history of the world. As far as
I know, I believe it. So um oh sure, I

(17:37):
was just getting wrapped up my own economic engines idling
high right now, Well, take your foot off the gas
and let's take a little break and we'll talk a
little bit about Mark Twain and uh what these a
few economic stats of the day right after this. Yeah, alright,

(18:15):
we're back, Charles. I'm feeling much better now that my
foots off. The guess that was this good advice. Well,
we we mentioned Mark Twain, And the only reason we're
going to talk about Mark Twain for a moment is
because in eighteen seventy three he co wrote a novel.
It's a satire called The Gilded Age Colon, a Tale
of Today, where it followed a poor country farmer who

(18:39):
is sort of I mean, does he move to the
city trying to get in on the Second Industrial Revolution? Yeah, totally.
It's it's exactly that kind of migration that you're talking
about just a few minutes ago. And it didn't work
out so well, right, I don't know, I've never read
the book, but from from what I can tell, um, no,
it didn't work out very well because he is taking

(18:59):
advantage of by all manner of bad people like crooked
politicians and crooked businessmen, um. And it is basically run
through the ringer from what I can tell. But for
I've also seen that that wasn't it wasn't exactly the
best piece of writing Mark Twain's ever come up with.
But the thing is that he releases in eighteen seventy three,

(19:22):
and this is like at the very beginning of the
Gilded Age. So he saw it pretty quickly what was
going on. And what he saw was this emergence from
a relatively egalitarian society of a group of ultra mind
bogglingly wealthy people that just rose up from the United

(19:46):
States and through you know, cheating and business acumen and
taking advantage of people and overworking people and underpaying people,
but also like having a lot of vision and foresight,
all the these things coming together grab control of almost
all of the wealth that was being produced by the

(20:07):
average American, and all of the average Americans put together,
who had moved to these cities for the promise of
better wages, better living than the farm could offer. Some
people were exploiting that more than other people, and those
people came to be known as the robber barons, and
they were the lynch pin of why people think of
the Gilded Age as a rotten part of American history. Yeah,

(20:28):
here's some stats for you. In eighteen ninety, the top
one and this they should all sound very familiar if
you're alive and breathing oxygen today, But in eighteen ninety,
the top one percent of the US owned fifty one
percent of all wealth. Yeah, dude, more than half of
all wealth in that nuts. It is nuts, but you're right,

(20:50):
it does sound very familiar. The top twelve percent owned
eighty six percent of all wealth, and the lower fort
of the US population, which was about half the population,
owned one cent. Uh. And here's that's even more nuts. Well,
I mean all these just top one another. I think
here's the last one. Uh in even the richest four

(21:13):
thousand families. That sounds like a lot of people, but
that's less than one percent of the population. The richest
four thousand had as much wealth as the other eleven
point six million families combined. Yeah, how about that? So
that is what you call economic inequality, right, And I
think the thing is is especially over time. But I

(21:36):
get the impression during that age too, like the people
who resent that, liberals typically um tend to be painted
with this brush that says, you're just jealous. You've never
made that much money in your life, you probably never will,
and it sickens you to see somebody else with that
money because you don't have it. And it's that second part,

(21:56):
that last part about because you don't have it, that
I think misses the mark work, and that even at
the time, during the guilded guilded age today when people
look at it in quality, that kind of stuff, what
there what a lot of them. I'm sure there are
people out there who are just jealous and haters for
that reason, but a lot of them say no, no,
like that, that that level, that that amount of disparity

(22:18):
shouldn't exist. Where if if there are people who are
just genuinely suffering, who are just poor and aren't able
to make it with whatever living they're making, um, if
they exist, they shouldn't have people who have that much
amount of money. And that was a sentiment in the
guilding guilded age is much too. It wasn't like they

(22:39):
didn't realize this was going on at the time. Um,
the sentiment was very much like it is today, except
in the Gilded Age they did things like form labor
unions and strike and um, and just basically did something
about it. They didn't take it laying down, which is
actually criticism that's levied or has been levied in the
past against people today. Yeah, and I think there's also

(23:03):
a notion that the more left leaning people are anti success,
and that's that's not true either. It's um, well, that's
all I'm gonna say about that. That's just not true. Okay,
it's just not true. They're they're not asids, they're not
anti success um. And and I don't think that every

(23:28):
conservative thinks like, yeah, man, that like it's all fair
and you should be able to do whatever you want
to get ahead and stomp on any one's head that
you want to get there. I think these are just
broad brush um things that keep the country divided. Yeah, absolutely,
I think that. Uh yeah, I think most both sides
misunderstand each other. Conservatives and liberals misunderstand each other to

(23:51):
a debilitating degree these days. Agreed, So let's let's get
off that. Let's go back to the original the o
g robber barons who were not to these guys, I'm
talking about the term robber baron, which didn't happen in
the nineteenth century US for the first time. It happened
thousands of years ago in Europe. I don't know about

(24:13):
thousands of years, but pretty close to, pretty close to eight,
I'll give you that. So um, apparently along the Rhine River,
if you wanted to move goods up and down northern
Europe like that was your your way to go. But
unfortunately for you. There were places where the Rhine river
like really narrowed with high cliffs, and you were easy

(24:35):
prey for local nobility who wanted to like set up
toll booths basically and said, you need to give me
some money if you want to keep going, implying your
goods along the Rhine. Yeah, and you had You couldn't
just portage your steamship up a mountain and over a mountain.
You had to pay the piper. Plus they didn't exist
at the time. What steam much hips? And when did

(24:58):
those come around? Uh? They early nineteenth century. You have
a much better just general world timeline that lives in
your brain than I do. Well. I understand history perfectly
and without any um delusions or any of my opinions
informing my vision of history as well. I think that's

(25:20):
what you're known for sure. Uh wait wait were you joking?
Oh no, okay, I just always get the time periods confused,
So I rely on books and research like a big
dumb dumb so so do I. Yeah, no, but then
you keep it in your brain. Mine just floats out
like like you ever cartoons with birds flying around people's

(25:43):
head when they get knocked out. Chuck, I've seen every
cartoon that ever existed, and I remember each of them
perfectly without any of my opinions coloring my view of them.
Those birds are always above my head. I don't have
to get hit with an antiville or a piano. So
the Ryne Gorge was one of those really narrow straits,

(26:03):
and uh in twelve fifty Emperor Frederick the Third died.
There was no successor, and basically that meant no regulation.
And believe it or not, even way back then, a
lack of regulation meant that people would take advantage of that.
That's the same as it is today. It's almost like
people are imperfect, almost, And so these thieves would move

(26:24):
into that gorge, jam up those tolls, maybe just steal
stuff if they wanted to as well. And they were
named the robber barons. That's where that term came from.
Those people, yeah, because they actually were like low level
nobility and they already were well off, but that didn't
prevent them from, you know, trying to take advantage of
the merchant class who were just trying to make their

(26:45):
way and make a living. And that became like a
really great description for some of the the most successful
business tycoons of the nineteenth century. I think it first
popped up in an Atlantic article in eighteen seven d Yeah,
where it didn't directly say that, it didn't say that
these guys are the new robber barons, but it said

(27:06):
that the old robber barons of the Ryan Valley were
actually probably more honest than the new aristocracy of swindling millionaires.
So that's a big, big time burn. So even in
eight seventy people were saying, like, this is wrong, there's
something like really wrong here. I mean, this is within
just a few years of the Guild of Age really

(27:27):
starting to take off, and people had already identified that
there were some major issues developing. Yeah, it's so weird
to look at this stuff and just how apt it
applies to what's going on today. And we think, I
think some people think that these are all new problems
and new issues, but it's as old as time, you know. Yeah,
it's so weird. It is a little weird to too.

(27:51):
It's it is weird. What's even weirder, though, is like
I believe if we if we look back, if we
zoom out far enough, we see humanity kind of ever
going upward, even though there's like peaks and valleys in
the line. The line overall is kind of up moves
upward towards something great, I think, but toward perfection. I

(28:14):
wasn't Maybe I wasn't. Uh, I wasn't alive ten thousand
years ago, So who knows. Maybe that was the pinnacle
of human existence. I don't know. Maybe. So should we
can say, should we talk about a few of these dudes? Yeah? So,
um we I feel like we have kind of set
this up that the robber barons were ruthless business tycoons,

(28:34):
and we're going to start with one of the first ones,
Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who, for my money, was the o
G robber baron. Yeah, and Commodore is a nickname, um that,
and as you will see he later, Vanderbilt University is
named for him, and their mascot is the Commodore's because

(28:55):
of him, and a commodore as a naval officer sort
of above not quite an admiral, but above the captain
a fleet. Oh well, that's actually pretty appropriate because he
did command a fleet of ships, originally sailboats. Originally a
sailboat I think when he was fourteen and then um,
steamships to ferry people around um, New York, there were

(29:22):
by this time, and you know, you know what's ironic.
We were talking about steamships and when they were invented.
The guy who invented steam, Robert Fulton. Remember we did
a whole episode on steam technology. He had a thirty
year monopoly UH in New York to ferry people using steamships,
and ironically, Cornelius Vanderbilt had to overcome that monopoly UH

(29:46):
using ingenuity and his own resourcefulness and eventually was successful
in breaking that monopoly just through good business tactics that
actually resulted in far lower fares for everyday people and companies.
I think just at his first try, UM, by improving
the size of the steam engine and using cheaper anthracite coal,

(30:09):
he managed to drop the average ferry price from like
seven dollars to three dollars and his first try. That's amazing. Yeah,
So so I think that's really kind of like instructive though,
man Like think about it. You think of this guy's
like a ruthless robber baron, and in many many ways
he was, as we'll see, but he was able to

(30:29):
get to that position by by outwitting and outsmarting other
robber barons, and that was the climate at the time.
Like it's so easy to sit back from this time
and just be like just judge, judge, judge. And it's
actually kind of fun too, it's a great pastime. But
you also have to remember at the time, um, that

(30:49):
was that was the business climate. That's just what it was.
And if you weren't willing to do that, well, then
you were not going to make it in in business.
Which is fine, Like maybe you'd say this is too
cutthroat for me, I'm just gonna sell out to these guys, um,
and there's nothing wrong with that. But the ones who
were left standing are the ones that you know, history
still remembers, for better for worse. Yeah, and it's worth

(31:10):
pouring out, um. And as we'll do with I think
we're going over four of these guys. But some had
money born into it, some started out very poor. And um,
Cornelius Vanderbilt, even though that sounds like such a rich,
hoity toity name, now, uh, he was born very poor.
He was born in sevent uh in a farming family

(31:31):
on uh Staaten Island and quit school when he was eleven.
And that's when he started working on the boat docks,
and he he was literally a self made man, starting
with that first little ferry boat that you mentioned at
age fourteen. Um. He was a big dude, and he
was very savvy but also very ruthless. He and this

(31:52):
is something that you'll see with a lot of these men,
was a competition and a competitive edge and nature. That
was sort of the underlying thing with all of them.
I think that I watched There Will Be Blood recently
for movie Crush and Daniel Plainview was very much based

(32:15):
on some of these robber barons and that he has
that great, great classic line from that movie when he goes,
I have a competition in me. I want no one
else to succeed, and that just crystallizes that character. And
I think a lot of these guys it wasn't enough
to just get rich. They wanted to devastate the competition, right.

(32:38):
So it makes you wonder, like, is that just a
normal There's just at any given time there's a you know,
a handful or a multiplicity of people who are like that.
It's just that these guys happened to be living in
a time where they had the freedom and ability to
exercise that to their to their greatest ability. Or was

(32:59):
it that these guys shaped the business world because they
all happened to be alive at the same time. I
don't know. It's it's interesting though that it's that competition,
and again with the plane view, not just a competition
to succeed, but accompassing competition to see that others don't. Right. So, um,

(33:21):
did you talk about the railroad yet? I didn't catch it. No.
So you know he started off in the steam uh, steamboats.
But if you know Vanderbilt, you know he was a
railroad guy. And if you look at the list of
robber barons, uh, I'd say easily like a third of
them were railroad men. Yeah. Because there was so much

(33:42):
money to be made from the railroads. It was just
like printing your own money. And one of the reasons
why was because there's so much stuff being shipped over
the railroads that if you own the railroad, you gotta
cut of every single industry because every single industry basically
had to use your form of transportation. That's why they
all got into it. Plus it was wide open, like

(34:04):
there was so much open space and so much room
for expansion that it was a it was a good
time to get rich off of the railroad for sure.
So his first railroad ride was at thirty nine years old.
He wasn't like in his twenties and early thirties getting
into the railroad business. He wasn't even on a train
until it was almost forty and that train crashed. Uh

(34:24):
an axle broke and went down an embankment and he
punctured along broke some bones, and I guess was lying
there wheezing out of a hole in his long saying,
this is the future. That was so great, and he
got into railroads. It's it's crazy, like a year later, Yeah,
he did. And one of the things that he had

(34:44):
a really great talent for was identifying like loser railroad
seemingly loser railroads and figuring out ways that they actually
had been overlooked in. A really good example of that
is the Harlem Railroad, which was just a short little
line other railroads, larger railroads used to connect to New
York City, but Vanderbilt recognized that it was the only

(35:05):
line that went all the way into the heart of Manhattan,
and so he bought that up. And he also at
the same time not only got control of that little railroad.
This is a really early chance for him to show
how good he was at driving up stock prices. So
when he came along and bought the Harlem Railroad, or
started buying shares of the Harlem Railroad, that was worth

(35:28):
in today's money, a hundred and sixty eight dollars of share,
not too shabby, but from what I could tell at
the time, not very great at all. By the time
he was done cornering this stock um, he had driven
the shares up to fifty hundred and ninety eight dollars
in just a few years. And so in doing so,

(35:50):
not only did he make a ton of money for himself,
he also developed this reputation that made owners of other
railroads say, I own a bunch of shares in my railroad.
You want to come buy mine and drive my stock
price and then buy me out. And so he didn't.
He didn't even have to plunder other companies. They came
to him and just said, here, buddy, Bias please. They

(36:12):
were Blue Star Airlines. What is that? Remember that from
from there will be blood. There were no airlines and
there will be blood. Remember Wall Street That was the
one that Martin Sheen worked for. Yeah, that Geko came
in and bought out and uh, I think he shuddered
them though. That was the difference. Yeah, yeah, he was

(36:33):
a corporator, he he Uh. And actually that era, the
eighties junk bondera, is frequently cited, or it was at
the time as the Second guild at age. This is
not the first time. We're living in what's known as
the Second guilded age. So to put a bow on Vanderbilt,
he uh consolidated, like you said, all these railways between
New York and Chicago. He manipulated stock, he fixed prices.

(36:57):
He the guy, like he said, earlier government wasn't looking
so you can kind of do what you wanted. And
he became a very very very wealthy man, and like
a lot of these guys, late in his life, turned
into a philanthropist. UM built Grand Central Station. It was
called the Grand Central Depot at the time, UM which
during the recession provided tons and tons of jobs for people. Uh.

(37:22):
And then the Central University of Nashville was eventually renamed
Vanderbilt University because all he did was give him a
million bucks. Isn't it crazy significant? Like I feel like
we could get stuff. You should know listeners to pitch
in and get a university named after us. Let's try that.

(37:42):
Actually like stuff you should know you we could do. Uh,
we can morganize the struggling university. How about that? Hey,
one more thing about Vanderbilt. So he left about a
hundred million dollars to his mostly to his eldest son, William.
In six years, William doubled that, mostly by investing in railroads.

(38:02):
That's how much money you can make in railroads. And
William was also well known for throwing probably the most
lavage party in the history of New York City. Um,
they spent one point eight million dollars in today's dollars
on champagne alone. Yeah, that was when he finished his
mansion on Fifth av And Uh. I looked it up
because to see if any of these robber baron mansions

(38:23):
were still around today. But yeah, I don't, Yeah, I
don't think it. I mean, I know this one was
demolished in ninety. So if you want to get a
really good idea of just how rich these people were,
go to Newport, Rhode Island and visit Millionaires Row, because
there was a huge there's a huge overlooking this cliff.
There's a long row of the most astounding mansions you've

(38:47):
ever seen built during the guilded one of the better
walks you can take in life. It really had the
ocean on one side and then these mansions on the other.
It's really cool and each mansion, each mansion is so
different from the others. It just touring them is amazing.
You could just be utterly disgusted by the concept of
billionaires or robber barons or whatever, and you can still

(39:07):
enjoy taking this tour of these mansions. They're just works
of art, you know. It's really it's really worth a visit.
Plus Newports just one of the more charming towns in
the kind I love Newport. Or you could take a
hate walk and uh, just look at those mansions and
think about what what wrecking ball would look like, shake
your fists at the dumb waiters and all that. But
then you turn around, look at the ocean and think, okay,

(39:29):
all right, it's really cool. It's like, it's a definitely
cool to visit them, for sure. And by the way,
a little piece of trivia if you go, if you
enter Central Park at the hundred and fifth Street entrance,
that big beautiful iron gate was from that mansion, the
Vanderbilt Mansion. They donated a lot of the stuff before
they demolished it, is that right? Yeah? So I mentioned

(39:51):
organization and that's actually named after the next robber Baron
we're going to talk about. Okay, do we break beforehand?
And I think we'd break after p how about that?
Are you okay with that? Okay? So so then we're
gonna hang in there. Everybody doneat don't fast forward yet,
We're going to stick around and talk about JP Morgan
right now. Yeah. He was born with money. He did

(40:13):
not come from meager means and work him stuff up
by his bootstraps. He was the son of a very
successful banker and merchant and used those connections to get
a plumb job at Wall Street when he was twenty
years old, and then when he was in his thirties,
he partnered partner with a guy named Anthony Drexel who
was a banker, uh and from Philly and created Drexel

(40:35):
Morgan and Company. And it became one of the biggest
investment banks at the time in the world. Yeah. Um,
And this was when he was in his early thirties,
like you said, right, so um. JP Morgan was known
as the guy who financed all the other robber barons um,
and he had his fingers in basically every pot that

(40:58):
was going on. He also knew that like, you could
make money off of the railroads because you're taking a
cut of all the other industries, so he definitely got
involved in them. But his whole thing was um what's
called horizontal integration, where you you you basically come along
you say this industry should be doing way better than
it is. I think there's too many competitors and they're

(41:18):
all holding one another down. I'm gonna slowly start buying
them up. And here's the thing. This is how you
get control of a full industry during the Gilded Age.
You go to a couple, you start buying them up,
and then you put all those together and you you
form a bigger company that's way leaner, has much better
economies of scale, and you can compete better against all

(41:40):
the other guys. So you start buying some of the
other guys up because they're facing going out of business now.
And then you've got left the real holdouts, the ones
that are never going to sell to you because they
hate your stupid face and they'll never give a penny
to you make sure that you'll never set foot in
their offices ever again. And what you do then is
you start selling for us than costs. Yeah, you're a

(42:02):
big company, so you can totally stand that for a
much longer time than these holdout competitors, and they face
either financial ruin or you eventually put them out of business,
and either way, you no longer have that competition. You
literally control an entire industry consolidated into one beefy mega company,
and all of a sudden you have what's called Morganization,

(42:22):
which was I don't know if that was pioneered by
JP Morgan, but he definitely perfected it enough that they
named the process after him. Yeah, and that's a good
example of what I was talking about earlier, is it's
not enough to succeed and be successful, but to make
sure no one else can be. So like it would
be the kind of thing and that one company you
were talking about that maybe kind of pretty small even,

(42:43):
but they might might hold have an iron grip on
one very tiny region of the United States, and you
could just let them have their business, or you could
do what you're talking about and make sure that you
uh squash them by any means necessary and forced them
to sell. And that's I think that's where capitalism for

(43:06):
a lot of people has gotten its bad name. Is like, yeah,
work hard, succeed do well, but not at the expense
of every other person trying to do well, right, because
it interferes with something this country is based on, which
is called the quality of opportunity, which is the idea
that at least under the eyes of the law, every

(43:28):
single person in America has an equal shot at making it,
at making something of themselves, of having like a good life.
And when somebody is cheating or engaging in monopolies or
using underhanded tactics to to run out the competition so
that there is no competition any longer, that that is problematic.

(43:48):
That that flies in the face of the idea of
equality of opportunity. That's right. And if you listen to
our Monopoly game episode UH, you might remember that JP
Morgan was the basis of uh monopoly Man. Yeah. We
talked about that good. Okay, that makes me feel good. Yeah.
He was modeled after old JP Morgan himself. Uh. And

(44:11):
he was actually one of the first people to be
targeted um for antitrust in nineteen o four, Teddy Roosevelt
came after him under the Sherman Antitrust Act and said, hey,
this Northern Securities Corporation, uh is really monopoly? And Supreme
Court said, yeah, it is busted up. Yeah. And so

(44:31):
today when we think of trusts, we think of like,
you know, a legal entity that that can hold um assets.
At the time, the word trust meant basically an industry
that had been morganized, where all of the competitors have
been folded into one large company and the market was
cornered by this one mega company, General Electric, UM U S. Steel,

(44:53):
Both of those were morganized companies. And apparently U S.
Steel was the first one billion dollar company that ever
existed because of that that level of consolidation. But then, yeah,
when the Sherman Anti Trust Act was passed in nine,
that was a clear sign that that this was not
going to stand much longer. And and I think Roosevelt,

(45:14):
it was Roosevelt, you said, right, who busted that up.
And he ran on that and actually went against He
was a Republican, I believe, and he went against the
advice of the you know, the elder statesman in the
Republican Party established himself as a genuine UM President of
the people and helped set himself up for reelection just
from that one anti trust act. So that's j P.

(45:38):
Now do we take a break. Oh one more thing, Chuck,
I'm not toying with you, I swear so. One one
of the ways that Morgan one of the reasons he's
reviled still. And he did some philanthropy, probably more than
he gets credit for, for sure, but UM. One of
the reasons he's revival is because one of the ways
he made it so that he could compete with other

(45:59):
companies was UM and sell for lower than than cost
was by slashing wages, slashing the workforce and increasing productivity
of the existing workers, and then just making sure that
working conditions. He didn't spend a cent on improving working
conditions to make them safe, and that that is really

(46:19):
not why not because he amassed a fortune. Some people
criticize him for that, but it's tactics like that, like
like becoming a billionaire basically UM on the backs of
people who he wouldn't have spent a cent to make
sure could stay alive working in his factories. That is
the quintessential problem people have always had with robber barons.

(46:44):
Is that kind of mentality? That's right now, I'm done.
All right, we'll come back right after this and finish
up with two more robber barons. Hello, everybody, we're back

(47:18):
to talk about Andrew Carnegie. You've ever been to Carnegie
Hall or Carnegie Mellon University. I've been to both. You've
been to one of the university with you. That's right.
We did a little job there one time. That was fun.
I've been to Carnegie Hall. I would I ushered a
show there. I didn't usher. I passed out the playbills,

(47:41):
which meant I got to see the show for free.
And I saw it. Oh man, it was one of
those special nights. I got to see Beethoven's Night with
the full orchestra and German choir at Carnegie Hall. It
was amazing. Wow. Something else that's pretty neat And all
I needed was a boat? Is that the one that's um?

(48:08):
Maybe I named it wrong. It's the dune dune dune, dune,
dune dun dun un. Oh, the die Hard song. Yeah,
the die Hard song. I got you and saw die
Hard in concert. It was great. Hious. So Carnegie, Uh,
we're talking about Andrew Carnegie who was born in Scotland

(48:28):
and they came to Pittsburgh. He was very poor. He's
about thirteen years old and he worked in a cotton
factory and he and this will come into play later,
he kind of self taught himself from books that he
borrowed from a wealthy benefactor from his private library, which
is will come to play later. His favorite one was

(48:50):
Flowers in the Attic. Wow, I would have thought great expectations,
but that's okay, no, So he Um, he, like Vanderbilt,
is a definitely a self made man for sure. And
I guess he kind of was. He had his fingers
in a lot of different pots, kind of like JP
Morgan at first. And then he turned his attention to

(49:11):
steel because again remember steel is like the basically the
the foundation for this American economy just blowing up. Sure,
so he he his name became synonymous with steel, and
I guess at first, up until about eight two, he
had a reputation as being a friend of the worker,

(49:32):
and that the workers at Carnegie Steele in Homestead, just
across the river from Pittsburgh. Um, they they felt like,
you know, Carnegie would take care of them. Um, and
They found out the hard way that that was not
the case when they went on strike in two during
what came to be known as the Homestead Strike, which
would result in the death of ten people, which is

(49:54):
not how they planned things to go. Uh. And apparently
the reason why that happened is because the Pinkerton's were
called in as strike breakers. Yeah. I might want to
eventually do an episode on this, but um that that's
sort of the overview. You bring in the Pinkerton's and
then they battle with the like literally with guns. Pinkerton's died.

(50:16):
I think like eight or nine of the ten or
twelve people that died rode the Pinkerton's. No, No, I
think it was just one I think were the strikers. Yeah, okay,
well we should definitely do a full episode then, because
for sure I want to get this right. But but
what I read was that the the strikers, Um, so,
the Pinkerton's showed up in barges and they were basically

(50:36):
hired on as a private army to protect scab workers
and and bust the strike up. Um. But they arrived
in barges and after the initial violence, the striking workers
and some of their families surrounded these barges and demanded
that the Pinkerton's come off the boats, and then the Pinkerton's.

(50:57):
So the Pinkerton's said, Okay, we'll come off if you
guarantee our safety. And they said fine, and the Pinkertons
came off and they got beaten by all of the strikers.
They just completely went back on their word and then
set their barges on fire. I guess the Pinkerton's escaped
to the factory with their life, and um, the National
Guard was called in to quell the violence. Yeah, well,

(51:19):
National Guard was called in not only to quell the violence,
but also called in to act in the interest of Carnegie.
So he kind of commandeered at his own little personal
army to help take care of things right, starting with
the Pinkerton's and then with the National Guard. And it's
like this kind of collusion that is also another huge criticism.
Like we were saying, the government is known for being
like las fair as far as the regulation is concerned,

(51:41):
but they'll totally send in the National Guard not just
to quell violence, but to make sure that the strike
breakers don't attack the scab labor to keep the factory going.
And that that that kind of like government capital collusion
at the expense of the workers. Is that is there's
a long standing edition of of that being almost universally

(52:03):
reviled in America over enough of an arc of time.
If that keeps up more and more just everyday, Americans
start to notice and start to resent it, and that
apparently is a really good force for social change, because
Americans don't like that kind of thing after a long
enough period of time. Yeah, And I think Carnegie tried
to distance himself from that strike by saying that he

(52:26):
was sort of out of the loop. He was in
Scotland the whole time, but they have since found correspondence
that shows that he was very much involved in that.
And you know, there's some speculation that he may have
had some genuine moments of regret and guilt over that,
because he was a big time philanthropist later in life.

(52:49):
I think he said in his book The Gospel of Wealth,
the man who dies thus rich dies disgraced. And uh,
we mentioned the libraries coming back into play. He more
than libraries, and that's really one of his big legacies,
along with um the arts, the Carnegie Corporation, and the

(53:09):
Endowment for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Museum. But
the libraries really have made a pretty big difference in
this country. They really have, for sure. Um. And he
was one of just the all time great philanthropists in
American history for sure. Um. But he still pales in
comparison to the the all time top record holder philanthropist,

(53:35):
John D. Rockefeller, who is also Robert Barroon. But he
also is far and away America's most prolific um and
generous benefactor for sure. He was also one of the
most visionary philanthropists of all time too. Yeah. And some
people say that he was, you know, if you just
account for money and inflation, the richest man ever to live. Um.

(54:00):
I'm not sure how they calculate that, because his nine
hundred million dollar UH peak in nineteen twelve is about
twenty three billion today. So here I saw how You're ready.
I'm sure it's yeah, go ahead if you do. His
wealth relative to the total economic output is an even
larger figure than gross domestic product. Had a feeling it

(54:22):
was something like that his wealth represented two percent of
the total economic output of the United States of the time.
To to have that value today, you would have to
be worth about three hundred and fifty billions, and I
think Jeff Bezos is worth hundred and forty or something
like that. Yeah, And I think we didn't even mention

(54:43):
it was it Carnegie that had at one point like
one dollar of every twenty dollars in circulation was his. Yeah,
that's right, that was Carnegie for sure. Yeah, I mean
these numbers are staggering, for sure, people like Rockefeller and
Carnegie is just it's unbelievable. But the thing is in
in like like John John D. Rockefeller was a ruthless,

(55:06):
ruthless businessman who put a lot of people out of business,
brought a lot of misery and hardship on just small
everyday producers of oil, which we'll see. But again, it's
really difficult to overstate the impact that his philanthropy has
had on the United States. He peaked at nine million,
like you said, when he died, he had he'd given

(55:28):
away everything but twenty six million of that, and he
probably felt kind of bad that he had twenty six
million dollars left because he had He was a very
religious man, and apparently he um learned very early on
that it was every man's religious duty to make as
much money as you possibly can and then to give
away as much money as you possibly can too. And

(55:51):
he he apparently lived that even before he was wealthy,
when he was still just an average worker, he would
give away something like ten percent of all of his
pay check. So he was a philanthropist his whole life,
for sure. He was still a robber baron too though, yeah,
and his whole you know, of course, oil was his business.
Standard oil, um, it was just a goliath and there

(56:11):
and there were a bunch of big like sort of
like the railroads. It was oil, and the railroads were
industries where you could have a bunch of people that
had these huge, huge corporations. But Standard Oil was far
and away bigger than any of them. By the early
nineteen hundreds, they controlled more than of the oil market,

(56:32):
can you imagine. And the way that he cornered the
market was, you know, he did that standard organization kind
of thing where he went around and bought it first
and then started to turn up the heat on the competition,
on the holdouts. But one of the ways that he
turned up that heat was he colluded with the railroad, um,
the different railroads in the area who were shipping all

(56:55):
this oil. To say, not only were they going to
give him a rebate so he got money back where
they wouldn't give money back to other oil shippers just
because of you know, volume, That makes sense, but they
also had to get his business, and he had so
much business that they would do this. They the railroads
had to tax and added tax on all of his competitors,

(57:16):
so they paid an extra twenty to thirty cents of
barrel to ship. Not just paid more than he did
because of his rebates, they paid more in addition to
that just for not being John D. Rockefeller. And then
on top of that, to keep him from taking that
rebate and going around to other railroads and getting a
cheaper rebate and abandoning that railroad. Um, they actually gave

(57:38):
him a kick back of that added tax. So his
competitors were getting taxed by the railroads and he was
actually getting some of that tax himself too. You just
can't possibly compete with that, and it put a lot
of smaller oil producers and shippers and refiners out of business.
It's amazing, it is. Uh. Let me see, he gave

(58:00):
seventy five million away to the University of Chicago. Well,
it kind of founded the University of Chicago with that money.
Also Spellman too, which was established to educate freed slaves.
Um he he he bankrolled Spellman for its founding as well.
And in one of our best and most favorite episodes

(58:20):
you might remember the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission helped eradicate hookworm
in the South. That is one of our better episodes
for sure. So those are just four of the uh
sort of most uh famous and some might say notorious.
Robert Barons big long list. You know you could throw
Henry Ford in there, uh, John Jacob Astor, Charles Schwab,

(58:44):
Andrew Mellon, Jay Gould, Yeah, I looked at I was
thinking about J. Paul Getty, but he was later on
he wouldn't have qualified. So some of these guys had
some terrible quotes to that also just made them despised
through history. Um. Carnegie said that, uh, it's not the
man who does the work who gets rich, it's the
man who gets other men to do the work, which

(59:05):
is not a very tasteful thing to say when you're
ultra wealthy and breaking strikes with guns. Um. That Jay
Gould guy I mentioned, He said that he could hire
one half of the workers in America to shoot the
other half to death if he wanted to, which is
another nice thing to say. And apparently John D. Rockefeller
once said competition is a sin. So these guys had

(59:29):
some terrible pr um and because of that a lot
of people have said, like, well, I wonder if some
of the ultra wealthy industrialists or innovators or people who
basically the billionaires who are leading the world today are
are they just like Robert Barns with better pr and
better marketing. And apparently supposedly that's not necessarily the case.

(59:52):
And here's why. Remember I was saying that like Robert
Barons were kind of being reformed by historians these days,
especially conservative historians. Well, they point to some like really
indisputable things like these guys were ruthless, and they engaged
in horrific anti competitive, uh kind of anti capitalist tactics

(01:00:15):
to to get those that wealth, and they did it
on the backs of workers that they took advantage of
and didn't pay very well and um killed in their workplaces. Basically. Um.
But the reason that America is still powerful today is
because of the work that these guys did of the
the industries that they created. UM. Public schooling came about

(01:00:37):
and was kind of became widespread to prepare people for
the jobs that these guys created. UM. And you really can't,
you can't look away from the fact that some of
them were the greatest philanthropists that the country has ever produced.
To UM, the that flies in the face with kind
of the exception of Bill Gates, it flies in the

(01:00:58):
face of the people who are around day, UM that
that not only are they not great phil anthropists necessarily.
I'm looking at Steve Jobs, who wasn't around anymore, but
definitely was not a good phil anthropist in his life.
He is now, his family is, but he wasn't when
he was alive. UM. That's a big, big mark against

(01:01:18):
people who have control of significant portions of the wealth
in America today. But also even more than that, those
guys today are they're presiding over a decline, the decline
in wages, decline in living conditions, whereas these guys, these
captains of industry and the robber barons from the nineteenth century,
they were presiding over a rise, like an improvement in UM,

(01:01:41):
the the way that America lived and the standard of living,
the kind of the polar opposite, even though the inequality
is roughly the same. Very interesting, I think so too.
I also wonder, though, too, if the this this inequality
will usher in a second progressive era where it seems
like it has all of the markings to do that.

(01:02:03):
We need to do a progressive era episode too sometime. Okay, alright, well,
since you said deal, Chuck, I think that's time for
a listener mail. Huh. Yeah, I think I alluded to
this in another one about the word marijuana. Didn't I
talk about that totally? But I didn't read the mail, right,
not that I remember. Now, all right, this is from

(01:02:24):
Jack Glick. Hey, guys, love the show. Been listening for
five years or so, to make sure not to miss
any new episodes, listening to the one on Macha when
you started to talk about marijuana, decided to get in touch.
I am the lead analyst on cannabis taxation for the
Canadian federal government, and we long ago made a decision
to refer to the plant by its proper name cannabis. Uh.

(01:02:46):
Marijuana has a number of historically racist associations, and I
know you guys are always using wary of using appropriate
terms for things. I had a good laugh at the
question over whether womb was still okay to say in
the ultrasound const I thought, you'mily to know that how
outdated and implicitly offensive marijuana is. And I'd like to

(01:03:06):
encourage you to use the word cannabis when referring to
in the future. All the best, keep it up. That
is from Jack Glick. That is a great name, Jack,
great job, great name, great email from a great guy.
I assume it sounds like a great guy. If you
want to show off what a great person you are,
you can email us yourself like Jack click did mean

(01:03:29):
what a great name? Um. You can wrap it up,
spank it on the bottom, and send it off to
Stuff podcast at iHeart radio dot com. Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeart Radios. How Stuff Works.
For more podcasts for my heart Radio is at the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.