June 10, 2009 • 18 mins
Although America's robber barons are often viewed in negative terms, they left a philanthropic legacy that continues today. Learn more about philanthropy and charity -- as well as the difference between the two -- in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Katis Keener, joined by a fellow editor, Katie Lambert. Hello, Cantas,
and today we're going to talk about some very controversial men,
(00:22):
the robber barons, who have a legacy of being greedy,
capitalist jerks. But we're going to actually talk about the
notion of philanthropy. And to do that we should probably
start back at the origins of the idea of philanthropy. Yes,
and it has rather mythic origins. And if you'll go
with me here for a moment and accept that Ms. Drew,
(00:43):
we will ensure to guess that the very first phil
anthropist was the Titan Prometheists, who, according to the story,
brought fire from the gods to people on Earth who
needed it for their sustenance. Essentially, And if you look
at the Greek word from which anthropy has derived, it
means love of humanity. And there's a difference between philanthropy
(01:06):
and charity. And the best way I can think of
to explain that difference is that charity is about treating
the symptoms. You give money for things that you can
actually see like, oh, those people are poor, let's give
them money, while philanthropy is about treating the causes, like oh,
those people are poor, let's figure out why and let's
fix that. I think people mistakenly use the words interchangeably
(01:28):
charity and philanthropy. And member of the Board of Directors
of the Pew Charitable Trusts, Rebecca Rymel explains that philanthropy
is actually a gift of transformation. And whereas in the
past a lot of charity was based on Christian ideals
of obligation of alms giving, for instance, of giving food
and money to the members of society who need it,
(01:51):
the concept of giving back to the society that has
nurtured you has really evolved throughout the centuries. And see
a beginning of evolution right around the sixteenth century in England,
when charity had become very different. And this was due
in part to a couple of factors. For one, England
(02:12):
had separated from the Church of from there was some
muss going on with a tutor throne, and the middle
class was getting larger, so the idea of a feudal society,
for instance, still working was a little out of the question.
The idea of a lord taking care of his surfs
because there were too many surf now and they were
getting a little bit wealthier. They had their trades, they
were making their own livings, and so uh, the authorities
(02:34):
that be decided that people giving out money didn't really
know what they were doing. They were actually making things
worse because they had no perspective of the larger social
issues at work, and the funds they were giving were
often misappropriated. So in sixteen o one we had two
different types of legislation, the Poor Relief Act, which Parliament
(02:55):
gave power to city officials to deal with poverty relief
measures through and then the Statue of Charitable Uses, which
essentially regulated funds from private donors under the supervision of
the Lord Chancellor. So you see the beginning of charity
becoming philanthropy, being governed by some sort of central authoritative
body and dolling it out and instead of just putting
(03:17):
money down the drain. There was actual oversight and some
questioning about what the causes of all this was precisely,
but in the twentieth century this is when scholars say
modern philanthropy really began, and we owe this huge glut
of money in the system and the United States at
(03:37):
least to the Industrial Revolution, and some men who made
the most of the different types of trades that were
going on. And that's where we get the term of
robber baron, although some people say that's unfair and they
should actually be called captains of industry or industrial statesmen.
And rand is actually a huge fan of the robber
barons and called them the greatest humanitarians of mankind, and
(04:00):
and also made the point that before anyone can rob,
there has to be something to rob. That's interesting because
one of the robber baron's own descendants said that she
was tired of hearing Andrew Carnegie talked about like a
Santa Claus, a great benevolent giver, she said, talk about
the real stuff. So I think there's two sides to
the robber barons, and most historians would agree that while
(04:22):
they were very greedy men who often manipulated not only
their workers and the system, but government as well to
make their billions, they gave a lot of it back.
The term robber barons actually comes from medieval Europe, and
robber barons are what they called warlords who prayed on
(04:42):
the people passing through their territories, and Matthew Josephson, a historian,
resurrected the term for his nineteen thirty four book about
these Gilded Age businessmen, where he painted them as ruthless,
greedy people who bribed the government, were bad to their workers,
and basically made money off the sweat of honest men's
back x. And to jump on what Josephson pointed out,
(05:03):
Jay Bradford DeLong, who wrote about Robert bare in Economics,
explains that in nine some economy historians think that direct
quote here, the share of national wealth held by the
richest one percent of households peaked at That's wild to
think that that tiny percentage of people could hold that
(05:25):
much of the national wealth. And DeLong goes on to
attribute the billionaires billions to three different factors, the first
being their inheritance and how well they did off the
stock market, the second being favors from the government, and
the third what he calls being in the right place
at the right time. And essentially this is making businesses
(05:46):
that mattered to the country's infrastructure and function, as well
as holding a monopoly on that particular business, an example
of which would be Carnegie getting into steal right before
the big railroad boom, before structors like the Brooklyn Bridge
and up. If you want to, you know, a monopoly
on that type of product and you can control everything,
then you're going to make billions. Well, and basically he
(06:07):
bought it all up before anyone wanted it, so he
had all the supply before there was ever a demand.
And you could say that having that kind of foresight,
well that's genius. He he deserved a share of that
money that he had. But then we get back into
this very difficult question that's still relevant to day, and
that is our society's wealthy as members obligated to give
(06:27):
their money back to society. And well, you know, venture
a couple of different answers here when we go on
to discuss whether or not the Robber Barons were in
fact history's greatest philanthropists. And in case you don't know
who the robber Barons are, we're going to throw out
some names that you've probably heard. John Jacob Astor, Andrew Carnegie,
Henry flaggler Um and Word, Henry Harriman, John d. Rockefeller,
(06:51):
Leland Stanford, Cornelius Vanderbilt. And if these last names sound familiar,
you can probably think of different schools and libraries and
structures and public facility is that share their last names.
That's not coincidental. One of the ways that these men
dealt with the guilt of amassing such great wealth was
giving it back to society. And Andrew Carnegie actually said
the man who dies rich dies disgraced. And later on
(07:14):
he gave a very telling amendment to that sort of
explanation by saying that the wealthy had to give back
to society, the society that's enabled them to amass their
wealth quote. And besides, it provides a refuge from self questioning.
And Carnegie is actually a fascinating case study of the
(07:34):
robber barons. He reckoned with his billionaire status by spreading
his money around. And he was born into a Scottish
family that fell into poverty as a result of Industrial
Revolution technology supplanting hand skilled laborers. His mother was incredibly
ashamed of the poverty that met the family, and she
was a driving force all throughout Andrew Carnegie's life. She
(07:55):
wanted nothing more than to appear in the town in
Scotland that they were forced to leave, writing in the
carriage and being very grand. He would later go on
to fulfill that dream of his mother's. So the Carnegie
family came to the United States in settled in Slabtown,
which was a neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Andrew had a couple
of jobs when he was starting out, begetting in a
(08:18):
textile factory, then becoming a telegraph messenger, then working on
the Pennsylvania Railroad under Thomas Scott. Then he settled in
New York. Became more interested in this best summer converter
that he kept hearing about and its contributions to refining
steel and what exactly it could do for the steel industry,
which was yet to boom. So he got in early,
(08:40):
setting up a plant, then acquiring more plants, and he
became this incredibly wealthy man based on a philosophy of
never fixing things. He would start a project completely over.
He would scrap things if they weren't going well, if
workers weren't cooperating, they were out. He didn't like cooperating
with unions. It was, you know, one chance or nothing
with him, and he came off very benevolent because he
(09:03):
hired an operating lieutenant named Henry Clay Frick to do
his dirty work. And you may remember Frick's participation in
the homestead scandal, which I wish we had time to
get into, but unfortunately we don't. But Carnegie always portrayed
that he was a benefactor to these workers, even though
he would only give them one day off per year,
(09:23):
and even though their personal lives meant nothing to him,
and he was so ruthless and his business adventures and
one great illustration of this ruthlessness is and the homogeneity
rumor that he started to get steel contracts for the railroads,
he began spreading the news that other steel manufacturers lacked
homogeneity and their steel, and so no one should work
(09:45):
with them. And no one knew what homogeneity really meant,
and it didn't mean anything. He was making it up.
But it was the start of corporate speaking. It was
the start of corporate speak, precisely. And from there, from
his high perch and in the um ivory tower of
wealth and business brilliance, he wrote a couple of books,
(10:06):
one of which advocated for democracy in the workplace, and
another was The Gospel of Wealth, which professed that the
wealthy had to give money for the public good. And
in d Carnegie became the richest man in the United
States when he sold his business for four d eighty
million dollars to JP Morgan, and he went on to
use this money to establish libraries the Carnegie Endowment for
(10:29):
World Peace in different centers for recreation and industrial towns
where he built these factories. It was sort of his
his ride off for his really hardline business practices. At
the end of his business ventures, he really wanted to
reconcile with with Frick, with whom and how to following
out years before, and Frick's response was tell Mr Carnegie,
(10:51):
I'll meet him in hell where we are both going.
I love that line because it paints a vastly different
picture of Carnegie than the man on who was allotting
money for world peace. It showed this type of telescopic philanthropy,
to quote Charles Dickens, the idea of thinking bigger than
the space you're in. If you can contribute money to
(11:14):
orphans in Africa, which was Dickens example, but your children
at home are running around in rags and they're dirty
and unfed, what good have you really done well? And
Carnegie's idea of philanthropy was rather elitist. My favorite quote
from him he discusses the duties of a man of
wealth as he sees them, and he says first to
set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance,
(11:37):
and after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which
come to him simply as trust funds which he has
called upon to administer, and goes on to say that
he's the trustee for his poor brethren because he has
superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer it for them.
So the people aren't smart enough to do things for themselves,
but these men of talent and of great wealth should
(11:59):
be taking care of the public funds for them. And
it's very hard to reconcile that with the idea of
a true philanthropist, because, in the broadest sense of the term,
setting up some sort of organization to dole out money
for the areas of society which needed the most, that's
what philanthropy is. It's solving the root of the problem
(12:21):
and sort of just trying to amuliorate it by putting
a band aid on it, you know, giving food to
a man instead of teaching him how to fish, which
would set him up for life. And he thought that
private citizens should be doing us as well, not the government.
He and his fellow robber barons did not believe that
the government was capable of doing that. They were probably
some of the original small government fans and thought that
(12:42):
private citizens should step in where the government was failing.
Private citizens didn't have the money, though, because the robber
barons had most of it, so they decided they would
step up. Actually, how magnanimous. My personal favorite Robert Baron
is actually John D. Rockefeller, who came from interesting beginnings.
According to one article I read from the Hoover Institution,
(13:03):
his father actually did sell snake oil, so snake oil
salesman actually has a real meaning there um a bit
of a con man. He married another woman while he
was still married to John's mother. Okay, you're talking about philanthropy,
nut philandering. Well, he really did achieve the American dream.
He worked from these not so auspicious beginnings to become
(13:25):
one of the richest men in America. And that feeds
into the idea that you owe the society in which
you're raised the money or a part of the money
that you've amasked to think that he came from nothing
and he was able to use the land and use
the institutions to create his fortune. But he was a
devout Baptist all of his life and that really influenced him.
(13:47):
And biographers have talked about it possibly being contradictory that
he was so religious and yet such a greedy businessman.
But one writer I was reading was saying that it's
not contradictory at all. It's more of a paradox kind
of thing, that he could be both things, that there
was great area there for him to be both quite
avaricious and also a good person. He did some great
(14:10):
stuff with his money. Because of him, hookworm was eradicated
in the South, So thanks for that, John, And he
also founded the University of Chicago, which even now is
one of the best universities in the nation. Well, it's
a circular argument to say that you should be less
of a greedy and hard line businessman and that you
should do great things with your wealth, because the harder
(14:33):
of a line that you take, perhaps the more money
you make, perhaps the more good you could do with
that greater fortune. Well, I think some of them use
that as a justification for being as hardline as they
were in their businesses. As well. The more money I
make the more I can get back, so I should
try to make as much as possible. I don't know
that sounds like Carnegie saying a reason for assuasion one's
(14:54):
guilt like I coorted earlier, and just for fun um.
Along with right well, sometimes comes great eccentricity and and
perhaps the logic some of these men used to deal
with their businesses was related to the fact that they
were essentially alone and their fortunes. Who could they relate to,
aside from the other massively wealthy few people there were,
(15:18):
and J. Pierpont Morgan did his part to help out,
bailing out the federal government from bankruptcy in when their
gold reserves had gone way way down, and ultimately it
was financial turmoil that brought down the age of the
robber barons. As uh Jay Bradford along when we were
discussing earlier explained, the Depression and New Deal era legislation
(15:43):
made it difficult and for a while it seemed impossible
to be a billionaire in the United States. The government
was essentially putting a cap on how much money people
can make. And then along came the modern era of technology,
telecommunication and computers, and it seemed inevitable that someone was
going to figure out the intricacies of this subject first
(16:07):
and make billions. And someone did, and that was Bill Gates.
And if you look at the most current list of
billionaires in the United States, I found one on Forbes
published in March two thousand nine. It's people in the
financial sector and people in technology who have made the most.
Bill Gates is number one. You have Warren Buffet number two,
Bloomberg at seventeen. And what's interesting, though, is that a
(16:31):
big percentage still is comprised of errors and heiresses. There
are three Walton's descended from Sam Walton of Walmart on
that list, and to Coke Oil airs as well. But
going back to philanthropy, I think Bill Gates and Warren
Buffett are both very involved in philanthropic efforts, very much so.
(16:52):
So we still we haven't answered this debate. And maybe
it's not a replace to about how much the wealthy
are obligated to be filthropic. It seems like society certainly
expects people to be philanthropic. Even if we just turned
to Hollywood for an instant and we look at the
different movie stars and celebrities who are known further philanthropy
(17:12):
Angelina Jolie, I think, for instance, philanthropic very much a humanitarian.
Perhaps she has a higher public opinion of her than
someone who seems to piddle away his wealth or her wealth,
or the way companies now do corporate contributions, and people
have criticized that more as a way of branding or
social marketing as opposed to philanthropic efforts that actually are
(17:35):
meant to help. Right, And we could go on and
debate what does it say about a woman if she's
hosting some sort of philanthropic gala and she wears a
five thousand dollar tour gown. What does that say? But
it's a personal decision at the end of the day,
just like these robber barons who were some of history's
greatest philanthropists in terms of dollars they doled out, it
(17:57):
was their decision to give to the causes they believed on.
Carnegie didn't have to set up an endowment for world peace.
Did it work? I don't know, but he believed in
the cause, so he put his billions in it. The
next time you go to the Carnegie Library as a
thought and for even more about philanthropy and these historical
robber barons. Be sure to check out the website at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
(18:20):
thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com
and be sure to check out the stuff you missed
in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot
com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Katis Keener, joined by a fellow editor, Katie Lambert. Hello, Cantas,
and today we're going to talk about some very controversial men,
(00:22):
the robber barons, who have a legacy of being greedy,
capitalist jerks. But we're going to actually talk about the
notion of philanthropy. And to do that we should probably
start back at the origins of the idea of philanthropy. Yes,
and it has rather mythic origins. And if you'll go
with me here for a moment and accept that Ms. Drew,
(00:43):
we will ensure to guess that the very first phil
anthropist was the Titan Prometheists, who, according to the story,
brought fire from the gods to people on Earth who
needed it for their sustenance. Essentially, And if you look
at the Greek word from which anthropy has derived, it
means love of humanity. And there's a difference between philanthropy
(01:06):
and charity. And the best way I can think of
to explain that difference is that charity is about treating
the symptoms. You give money for things that you can
actually see like, oh, those people are poor, let's give
them money, while philanthropy is about treating the causes, like oh,
those people are poor, let's figure out why and let's
fix that. I think people mistakenly use the words interchangeably
(01:28):
charity and philanthropy. And member of the Board of Directors
of the Pew Charitable Trusts, Rebecca Rymel explains that philanthropy
is actually a gift of transformation. And whereas in the
past a lot of charity was based on Christian ideals
of obligation of alms giving, for instance, of giving food
and money to the members of society who need it,
(01:51):
the concept of giving back to the society that has
nurtured you has really evolved throughout the centuries. And see
a beginning of evolution right around the sixteenth century in England,
when charity had become very different. And this was due
in part to a couple of factors. For one, England
(02:12):
had separated from the Church of from there was some
muss going on with a tutor throne, and the middle
class was getting larger, so the idea of a feudal society,
for instance, still working was a little out of the question.
The idea of a lord taking care of his surfs
because there were too many surf now and they were
getting a little bit wealthier. They had their trades, they
were making their own livings, and so uh, the authorities
(02:34):
that be decided that people giving out money didn't really
know what they were doing. They were actually making things
worse because they had no perspective of the larger social
issues at work, and the funds they were giving were
often misappropriated. So in sixteen o one we had two
different types of legislation, the Poor Relief Act, which Parliament
(02:55):
gave power to city officials to deal with poverty relief
measures through and then the Statue of Charitable Uses, which
essentially regulated funds from private donors under the supervision of
the Lord Chancellor. So you see the beginning of charity
becoming philanthropy, being governed by some sort of central authoritative
body and dolling it out and instead of just putting
(03:17):
money down the drain. There was actual oversight and some
questioning about what the causes of all this was precisely,
but in the twentieth century this is when scholars say
modern philanthropy really began, and we owe this huge glut
of money in the system and the United States at
(03:37):
least to the Industrial Revolution, and some men who made
the most of the different types of trades that were
going on. And that's where we get the term of
robber baron, although some people say that's unfair and they
should actually be called captains of industry or industrial statesmen.
And rand is actually a huge fan of the robber
barons and called them the greatest humanitarians of mankind, and
(04:00):
and also made the point that before anyone can rob,
there has to be something to rob. That's interesting because
one of the robber baron's own descendants said that she
was tired of hearing Andrew Carnegie talked about like a
Santa Claus, a great benevolent giver, she said, talk about
the real stuff. So I think there's two sides to
the robber barons, and most historians would agree that while
(04:22):
they were very greedy men who often manipulated not only
their workers and the system, but government as well to
make their billions, they gave a lot of it back.
The term robber barons actually comes from medieval Europe, and
robber barons are what they called warlords who prayed on
(04:42):
the people passing through their territories, and Matthew Josephson, a historian,
resurrected the term for his nineteen thirty four book about
these Gilded Age businessmen, where he painted them as ruthless,
greedy people who bribed the government, were bad to their workers,
and basically made money off the sweat of honest men's
back x. And to jump on what Josephson pointed out,
(05:03):
Jay Bradford DeLong, who wrote about Robert bare in Economics,
explains that in nine some economy historians think that direct
quote here, the share of national wealth held by the
richest one percent of households peaked at That's wild to
think that that tiny percentage of people could hold that
(05:25):
much of the national wealth. And DeLong goes on to
attribute the billionaires billions to three different factors, the first
being their inheritance and how well they did off the
stock market, the second being favors from the government, and
the third what he calls being in the right place
at the right time. And essentially this is making businesses
(05:46):
that mattered to the country's infrastructure and function, as well
as holding a monopoly on that particular business, an example
of which would be Carnegie getting into steal right before
the big railroad boom, before structors like the Brooklyn Bridge
and up. If you want to, you know, a monopoly
on that type of product and you can control everything,
then you're going to make billions. Well, and basically he
(06:07):
bought it all up before anyone wanted it, so he
had all the supply before there was ever a demand.
And you could say that having that kind of foresight,
well that's genius. He he deserved a share of that
money that he had. But then we get back into
this very difficult question that's still relevant to day, and
that is our society's wealthy as members obligated to give
(06:27):
their money back to society. And well, you know, venture
a couple of different answers here when we go on
to discuss whether or not the Robber Barons were in
fact history's greatest philanthropists. And in case you don't know
who the robber Barons are, we're going to throw out
some names that you've probably heard. John Jacob Astor, Andrew Carnegie,
Henry flaggler Um and Word, Henry Harriman, John d. Rockefeller,
(06:51):
Leland Stanford, Cornelius Vanderbilt. And if these last names sound familiar,
you can probably think of different schools and libraries and
structures and public facility is that share their last names.
That's not coincidental. One of the ways that these men
dealt with the guilt of amassing such great wealth was
giving it back to society. And Andrew Carnegie actually said
the man who dies rich dies disgraced. And later on
(07:14):
he gave a very telling amendment to that sort of
explanation by saying that the wealthy had to give back
to society, the society that's enabled them to amass their
wealth quote. And besides, it provides a refuge from self questioning.
And Carnegie is actually a fascinating case study of the
(07:34):
robber barons. He reckoned with his billionaire status by spreading
his money around. And he was born into a Scottish
family that fell into poverty as a result of Industrial
Revolution technology supplanting hand skilled laborers. His mother was incredibly
ashamed of the poverty that met the family, and she
was a driving force all throughout Andrew Carnegie's life. She
(07:55):
wanted nothing more than to appear in the town in
Scotland that they were forced to leave, writing in the
carriage and being very grand. He would later go on
to fulfill that dream of his mother's. So the Carnegie
family came to the United States in settled in Slabtown,
which was a neighborhood in Pittsburgh. Andrew had a couple
of jobs when he was starting out, begetting in a
(08:18):
textile factory, then becoming a telegraph messenger, then working on
the Pennsylvania Railroad under Thomas Scott. Then he settled in
New York. Became more interested in this best summer converter
that he kept hearing about and its contributions to refining
steel and what exactly it could do for the steel industry,
which was yet to boom. So he got in early,
(08:40):
setting up a plant, then acquiring more plants, and he
became this incredibly wealthy man based on a philosophy of
never fixing things. He would start a project completely over.
He would scrap things if they weren't going well, if
workers weren't cooperating, they were out. He didn't like cooperating
with unions. It was, you know, one chance or nothing
with him, and he came off very benevolent because he
(09:03):
hired an operating lieutenant named Henry Clay Frick to do
his dirty work. And you may remember Frick's participation in
the homestead scandal, which I wish we had time to
get into, but unfortunately we don't. But Carnegie always portrayed
that he was a benefactor to these workers, even though
he would only give them one day off per year,
(09:23):
and even though their personal lives meant nothing to him,
and he was so ruthless and his business adventures and
one great illustration of this ruthlessness is and the homogeneity
rumor that he started to get steel contracts for the railroads,
he began spreading the news that other steel manufacturers lacked
homogeneity and their steel, and so no one should work
(09:45):
with them. And no one knew what homogeneity really meant,
and it didn't mean anything. He was making it up.
But it was the start of corporate speaking. It was
the start of corporate speak, precisely. And from there, from
his high perch and in the um ivory tower of
wealth and business brilliance, he wrote a couple of books,
(10:06):
one of which advocated for democracy in the workplace, and
another was The Gospel of Wealth, which professed that the
wealthy had to give money for the public good. And
in d Carnegie became the richest man in the United
States when he sold his business for four d eighty
million dollars to JP Morgan, and he went on to
use this money to establish libraries the Carnegie Endowment for
(10:29):
World Peace in different centers for recreation and industrial towns
where he built these factories. It was sort of his
his ride off for his really hardline business practices. At
the end of his business ventures, he really wanted to
reconcile with with Frick, with whom and how to following
out years before, and Frick's response was tell Mr Carnegie,
(10:51):
I'll meet him in hell where we are both going.
I love that line because it paints a vastly different
picture of Carnegie than the man on who was allotting
money for world peace. It showed this type of telescopic philanthropy,
to quote Charles Dickens, the idea of thinking bigger than
the space you're in. If you can contribute money to
(11:14):
orphans in Africa, which was Dickens example, but your children
at home are running around in rags and they're dirty
and unfed, what good have you really done well? And
Carnegie's idea of philanthropy was rather elitist. My favorite quote
from him he discusses the duties of a man of
wealth as he sees them, and he says first to
set an example of modest, unostentatious living, shunning display or extravagance,
(11:37):
and after doing so, to consider all surplus revenues which
come to him simply as trust funds which he has
called upon to administer, and goes on to say that
he's the trustee for his poor brethren because he has
superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer it for them.
So the people aren't smart enough to do things for themselves,
but these men of talent and of great wealth should
(11:59):
be taking care of the public funds for them. And
it's very hard to reconcile that with the idea of
a true philanthropist, because, in the broadest sense of the term,
setting up some sort of organization to dole out money
for the areas of society which needed the most, that's
what philanthropy is. It's solving the root of the problem
(12:21):
and sort of just trying to amuliorate it by putting
a band aid on it, you know, giving food to
a man instead of teaching him how to fish, which
would set him up for life. And he thought that
private citizens should be doing us as well, not the government.
He and his fellow robber barons did not believe that
the government was capable of doing that. They were probably
some of the original small government fans and thought that
(12:42):
private citizens should step in where the government was failing.
Private citizens didn't have the money, though, because the robber
barons had most of it, so they decided they would
step up. Actually, how magnanimous. My personal favorite Robert Baron
is actually John D. Rockefeller, who came from interesting beginnings.
According to one article I read from the Hoover Institution,
(13:03):
his father actually did sell snake oil, so snake oil
salesman actually has a real meaning there um a bit
of a con man. He married another woman while he
was still married to John's mother. Okay, you're talking about philanthropy,
nut philandering. Well, he really did achieve the American dream.
He worked from these not so auspicious beginnings to become
(13:25):
one of the richest men in America. And that feeds
into the idea that you owe the society in which
you're raised the money or a part of the money
that you've amasked to think that he came from nothing
and he was able to use the land and use
the institutions to create his fortune. But he was a
devout Baptist all of his life and that really influenced him.
(13:47):
And biographers have talked about it possibly being contradictory that
he was so religious and yet such a greedy businessman.
But one writer I was reading was saying that it's
not contradictory at all. It's more of a paradox kind
of thing, that he could be both things, that there
was great area there for him to be both quite
avaricious and also a good person. He did some great
(14:10):
stuff with his money. Because of him, hookworm was eradicated
in the South, So thanks for that, John, And he
also founded the University of Chicago, which even now is
one of the best universities in the nation. Well, it's
a circular argument to say that you should be less
of a greedy and hard line businessman and that you
should do great things with your wealth, because the harder
(14:33):
of a line that you take, perhaps the more money
you make, perhaps the more good you could do with
that greater fortune. Well, I think some of them use
that as a justification for being as hardline as they
were in their businesses. As well. The more money I
make the more I can get back, so I should
try to make as much as possible. I don't know
that sounds like Carnegie saying a reason for assuasion one's
(14:54):
guilt like I coorted earlier, and just for fun um.
Along with right well, sometimes comes great eccentricity and and
perhaps the logic some of these men used to deal
with their businesses was related to the fact that they
were essentially alone and their fortunes. Who could they relate to,
aside from the other massively wealthy few people there were,
(15:18):
and J. Pierpont Morgan did his part to help out,
bailing out the federal government from bankruptcy in when their
gold reserves had gone way way down, and ultimately it
was financial turmoil that brought down the age of the
robber barons. As uh Jay Bradford along when we were
discussing earlier explained, the Depression and New Deal era legislation
(15:43):
made it difficult and for a while it seemed impossible
to be a billionaire in the United States. The government
was essentially putting a cap on how much money people
can make. And then along came the modern era of technology,
telecommunication and computers, and it seemed inevitable that someone was
going to figure out the intricacies of this subject first
(16:07):
and make billions. And someone did, and that was Bill Gates.
And if you look at the most current list of
billionaires in the United States, I found one on Forbes
published in March two thousand nine. It's people in the
financial sector and people in technology who have made the most.
Bill Gates is number one. You have Warren Buffet number two,
Bloomberg at seventeen. And what's interesting, though, is that a
(16:31):
big percentage still is comprised of errors and heiresses. There
are three Walton's descended from Sam Walton of Walmart on
that list, and to Coke Oil airs as well. But
going back to philanthropy, I think Bill Gates and Warren
Buffett are both very involved in philanthropic efforts, very much so.
(16:52):
So we still we haven't answered this debate. And maybe
it's not a replace to about how much the wealthy
are obligated to be filthropic. It seems like society certainly
expects people to be philanthropic. Even if we just turned
to Hollywood for an instant and we look at the
different movie stars and celebrities who are known further philanthropy
(17:12):
Angelina Jolie, I think, for instance, philanthropic very much a humanitarian.
Perhaps she has a higher public opinion of her than
someone who seems to piddle away his wealth or her wealth,
or the way companies now do corporate contributions, and people
have criticized that more as a way of branding or
social marketing as opposed to philanthropic efforts that actually are
(17:35):
meant to help. Right, And we could go on and
debate what does it say about a woman if she's
hosting some sort of philanthropic gala and she wears a
five thousand dollar tour gown. What does that say? But
it's a personal decision at the end of the day,
just like these robber barons who were some of history's
greatest philanthropists in terms of dollars they doled out, it
(17:57):
was their decision to give to the causes they believed on.
Carnegie didn't have to set up an endowment for world peace.
Did it work? I don't know, but he believed in
the cause, so he put his billions in it. The
next time you go to the Carnegie Library as a
thought and for even more about philanthropy and these historical
robber barons. Be sure to check out the website at
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
(18:20):
thousands of other topics. Visit how stuff works dot com
and be sure to check out the stuff you missed
in History Class blog on the how stuff works dot
com home page
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