Selects: 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 this classic episode.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, it's me Josh. For this week's Select I've
chosen our July twenty twenty episode on robber Barons. It
turns out that today's billionaires and leaders of industry bears
some resemblance to the robber barons of the Gilded Age,
but there are some big differences. Namely, today's billionaires are
kind of terrible at philanthropy, and the robber barons of

(00:20):
the last century were far less preoccupied with outer space.
Hope you enjoyed this episode. It's a pretty good one.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's
Charles W. Chuckers Bryant over there. Jerry was just here
doing the COVID setup and then got out of the
room really quick.

Speaker 3 (00:54):
Hell their breath for five straight minutes.

Speaker 4 (00:56):
It's a new record. It really is a new studio.

Speaker 1 (01:00):
Sure, and this is stuff you should know. That's no
David Blaine record, by the way.

Speaker 2 (01:05):
No, I mean that's her studio record. You should see
her when she's pearl diving, though.

Speaker 1 (01:11):
Wouldn't that be something if Jerry did have a secret
life pearl diving that would be amazing. It would, but
we're not talking about Jerry Chuck enough about her. Instead,
I propose that we have a nice, pleasant conversation about
robber barons.

Speaker 2 (01:28):
Yeah, this is an interesting topic because depending 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.

Speaker 3 (01:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
Yeah, And at first, from what I could tell, historians,
like immediately after in the like a few decades after
the Gilded Age, which we'll talk about, where the you know,
the age the robber barons worked and operated and lived in,
really took it to be like their their presence, their
existence was one of the worst things ever. But over time,

(02:05):
there's kind of been a reformation of them, you know,
kind of like a revisiting of them that has tried
to revive their image or actually make their image possibly
better than it ever has been.

Speaker 4 (02:18):
Yeah, I mean it kind of.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
I think a lot of 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. That's all just free trade man,
free capitalism, and that's how it works out. And then

(02:41):
those guys a ton of gave a ton of money
to society before they died, and so they that's that's
all the injustifies the means.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Yeah, I actually, yeah, that's the conservative way to look
at it. And I ran across something I can't remember
what's 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

(03:14):
because it will always be imperfect and in ruin that
that is a cornerstone, a hallmark of conservatism.

Speaker 3 (03:22):
Did you know that?

Speaker 2 (03:25):
I didn't, But I mean, of course you can't make
a perfect society.

Speaker 4 (03:29):
It makes sense.

Speaker 1 (03:30):
Well, so conservatives are saying that in opposition to all
of the liberal efforts to make a perfect society, to
have government regulation that says no, no, we should all
have clean water, and we should do it at the
expense of making corporations clean up the waste water before
they release their waste into the shared common water resources.

(03:53):
Things like that, right, And that there's this idea that
you can mold society into some perfect form, that that's
the opposite 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

(04:16):
I had no idea that it was just that simple,
and it really kind of is.

Speaker 2 (04:20):
I think the word perfect is what's a stumbling block
for me, because I don't know a single liberal thinks
that they can make things perfect.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
Yeah, the goal is to make things better. Yeah, yeah, agreed.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
I don't know that it's it's a great word either,
but i'd think that that's you know, I mean, hey,
you're gonna argue with the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy, I'm not.

Speaker 4 (04:39):
I'll bring it on, man, I'll punch that thing right
in the face.

Speaker 1 (04:42):
Speaking of Stanford, did you know that Stanford University was
named out verbarranded.

Speaker 3 (04:48):
Yeah, a robber baron named Leland Stanford.

Speaker 2 (04:51):
Actually, yeah, a lot of universities are named after Robert barons.

Speaker 3 (04:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
There's a lot of problems with some of the early
histories of universities, as we'll find out in the coming weeks.

Speaker 4 (05:01):
So we should get into the Gilded Age.

Speaker 2 (05:03):
We should hop in the old wayback machine, because that's
the age that we're talking about. And when you hear
gilded age, it might sound really great, because I mean,
what's better than a gilded I don't know, toilet.

Speaker 3 (05:19):
Gilded Lily?

Speaker 1 (05:21):
Isn't that another one that another thing people guild?

Speaker 4 (05:24):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
That's a pretty good band name though, Gilded Lily, Yeah,
like a nineties power pop.

Speaker 1 (05:29):
Oh, totally, you nailed it. And I said, what about breakfast?
Said Tiffany's.

Speaker 4 (05:36):
But the Gilded Age is.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
And Dave Ruz helped us put this together, and he
points out it's not a term of endearment.

Speaker 4 (05:42):
When something is gilded.

Speaker 2 (05:43):
That means it's it's got a thin coating of gold,
but underneath it's you know, it could be a gilded turd.

Speaker 3 (05:50):
Sure, I hate that word so much.

Speaker 4 (05:53):
I love it. It's so great, do you? Oh? Yeah,
I mean I hate I love it and how awful
it is?

Speaker 3 (06:00):
Oh gotcha?

Speaker 1 (06:01):
But I think it's so awful it like comes out
on the other side as just plain old awful to me. Okay,
So yeah, that's the idea of the Gilded Age that
it looked great on the outside, but on the inside
it wasn't so great. And what it was this So
this was the second half of the nineteenth century, basically
from pretty much the end of the Civil War up

(06:23):
until the first decade of the twentieth century, yea. And
it was characterized by a huge, 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, in about fifteen years, the American economy doubled

(06:46):
doubled inside in fifteen years. That's how massive it was,
and that's how fast it happened.

Speaker 3 (06:52):
And what it was was.

Speaker 1 (06:52):
A transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society.
And it happened virtually over night as far as history goes.

Speaker 2 (07:02):
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.

Speaker 4 (07:11):
Just let your dudes do what you're going to do,
no regulation.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
You can be as competitive as you want to be,
and you can satisfy a scratch every capitalist itch you want,
and we're just going to let that happen because we're
also kind of getting rich on the side.

Speaker 1 (07:28):
Right, So that kind of raises something that I saw
is that the idea that it's kind of like a
myth of the lase fair government during this era. They
were definitely lase 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

(07:49):
and political entrepreneurship and helping out the wealthy class at
the expense of the people in general. So in one hand,
on one hand, they were lase fair, on the other
they were not.

Speaker 2 (08:02):
Yeah, and what we're talking about here is stuff like
snatching up resources where you could hoarding them for yourself,
like building such a massive business that you could drive
out every other smaller business, drive them right out of
business by undercutting their prices. Jobs were more scarce, so

(08:23):
you could have people work harder for less and less wages.

Speaker 3 (08:27):
That kind of thing, right exactly.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
And what's crazy, Like it was a dog eat dog economy.

Speaker 3 (08:36):
Yeah, it was just nuts how it happened.

Speaker 1 (08:38):
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 the

(09:00):
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 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 be had.

(09:22):
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
the United States is truly becoming a continent wide nation,
the federal government is kind of lagging behind to catch up,
and wouldn't really begin to catch up in the progressive era.

(09:45):
And some would say that the pendulum swung the exact
opposite way to the exact opposite extreme direction that it
had during the Gilded age.

Speaker 2 (09:53):
Yeah, I mean, let's talk about the Gilded Age and
the I guess just you owe it all to train really,
and trains you owed to steel, so you got to
go back a little bit. Steel was a very big
deal in that when they found out mister Henry Bessemer
in the eighteen fifties found out how to make steel

(10:16):
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, and
all of a sudden, you could open up those local
rail lines to stretch across the country and all these
regional specialty businesses and industries, whether it was you know,

(10:37):
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. You
could get that stuff anywhere you wanted to go, and
that changed everything.

Speaker 1 (10:51):
Yeah, not only could you get it to where you
wanted to go, you could do it exponentially cheaper than
it used to be over land or say using canals,
and then also way faster too. So now if you
were making like really great armchairs in Cincinnati, like you
were saying, like, not only did you have the town
that they're just known for it, that's their mascot, I

(11:13):
believe of the baseball team.

Speaker 4 (11:14):
Yeah, citters right.

Speaker 1 (11:17):
Not only did you have the town of Cincinnati and
maybe some other regional parts of Ohio as your market,
you know how the entire country to supply with chairs.
And that happened at a really great time, the steel
coming along and building the railroads, because the United States
economic engine was kind of idling a really high rpm

(11:38):
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 started
to exploit more industry and resources rather than rely on
imports from Europe.

Speaker 3 (11:55):
That was a big one.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
And then the Civil War had it 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 engine got put into gear and it just kind
of took off like a rocket.

Speaker 4 (12:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (12:15):
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 the global trade and the globalization.
I wonder if people railed against nationalization of commerce back then,
or if they all just thought it was all great.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
No.

Speaker 1 (12:35):
No, But one of the things I read about that's
actually a mark in favor of the Gilded Age being
actually a good thing for America is that people everyday
people were super involved in politics, in the political process
and agitating for what they wanted. And so if there
were people who were definitely in favor of this kind

(12:57):
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. I figure 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 and being like, well, nothing we can do

(13:17):
about it.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:29):
Is not what they said, like in Cincinnati.

Speaker 4 (13:31):
Is that not a Cincinnati accident?

Speaker 3 (13:33):
No?

Speaker 2 (13:34):
Okay, I might be thinking of Maine. Yeah right, But
I wonder if I wonder who was opposing it.

Speaker 1 (13:41):
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.

Speaker 3 (13:56):
I think they wanted easy money. I can't remember who wanted.

Speaker 1 (13:59):
To stay on the gold standard and others wanted, you know, basically,
to leave the gold standard and make money a lot
more easy to come by.

Speaker 4 (14:09):
The runny Dangerfield movie.

Speaker 1 (14:11):
That was an easy easy money. Man, That is a
tawdry movie, wasn't it.

Speaker 3 (14:17):
Yeah? It was good though.

Speaker 4 (14:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (14:20):
Hey, even the worst Dangerfield movies are still pretty great. Agreed,
And on that point, real quick, I'm sorry. I know
we don't like to go off on tangents very often,
but I have been watching Happy Days and surely.

Speaker 4 (14:36):
Lately, man, that is some comfort food, isn't it, Dude?

Speaker 3 (14:40):
They are?

Speaker 1 (14:40):
But not only that, it's not like junk food though,
they're like, well, written, well acted, sure, 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.

Speaker 3 (14:55):
Man.

Speaker 4 (14:56):
Yeah, I agree.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
And you know what, since we're on this tangent, we
should tell everyone that we're writing a book and it's coming.

Speaker 3 (15:02):
Out this fall. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
It's called Stuff you Should Know, an incomplete compendium of
mostly interesting things. And you can pre order it now
if you want a special Tustin poster.

Speaker 1 (15:11):
Yeah, you pre order 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 get your pre order gift and you upload a
picture of your receipt and they mail it to you
and you will be very happy with it because it's
pretty awesome.

Speaker 2 (15:26):
Yeah, and we want to sell We do want to
sell these books out there. We want to sell these
books all over the world.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
Yes, we're glad that the railroad exists so we can
move these books around easily.

Speaker 2 (15:37):
Oh man, you ain't kidding ship these things to Cincinnata, right,
So where were we? So we were shipping things. Regional
businesses were 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

(15:59):
were going north because reconstruction didn't work out so well.

Speaker 3 (16:03):
Yeah, because it was that abandoned.

Speaker 4 (16:04):
Yeah. Yeah, Have we done one on reconstruction?

Speaker 1 (16:08):
No, No, we really need to though, totally. I mean
the more 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.

Speaker 2 (16:16):
But the point is there are a lot of people
flocking to work. This what was called the Second Industrial Revolution,
where we saw over a period of about forty years,
factory output went from one point nine billion to thirteen
billion dollars.

Speaker 1 (16:31):
Right, I mean like this happened like almost overnight. It's
astounding how fast this happened. I don't think it even
happened this fast in the First Industrial Revolution, you know,
the one that started over in Manchester. Like I think
that it's this is nothing like this has ever happened
in the.

Speaker 3 (16:50):
History of the world. As far as I know, I
believe it.

Speaker 1 (16:54):
So oh sure, I was just getting reped up. My
own economic engines idling high.

Speaker 2 (17:00):
Right now, Well, take your foot off the gas, okay,
and let's take a little break and we'll talk a
little bit about Mark Twain and what these a few
economic stats of the day right after this.

Speaker 1 (17:35):
All right, we're back, Charles. I'm feeling much better now
that my foot's off the gas. That was just good advice.

Speaker 4 (17:41):
Well, I mentioned Mark Twain.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
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, a satire called The Gilded
Age Colon a Tale of Today, where it followed a
poor country farmer who is sort of I mean, does
he move to the city trying to get in on

(18:03):
the Second Industrial Revolution?

Speaker 3 (18:05):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
It's exactly that kind of migration that you were talking
about just a few minutes ago.

Speaker 4 (18:10):
And it didn't work out so well. Right.

Speaker 3 (18:13):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (18:13):
I've never read the book, but from what I can tell, no,
it didn't work out very well because he has taken
advantage of by all manner of bad people like crooked
politicians and crooked businessmen, and is basically run through the
ringer from what I can tell. But I've also seen

(18:34):
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. Yeah, and
this is like at the very beginning of the Guilded Age,
So he saw it pretty quickly what was going on.
And what he saw was this emergence from a relatively

(18:55):
egalitarian society of a group of old, mind bogglingly wealthy
people that just rose up from the United States and
through you know, cheating and business acumen and taking advantage
of people and overworking people and underpaying people, but also

(19:18):
like having a lot of vision and foresight, all these
things coming together grab control of almost all of the
wealth that was being produced by the 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

(19:39):
be known as the robber barons, and they were the
lynchpin of why people think of the Gilded Age as
a rotten part of American history.

Speaker 2 (19:48):
Yeah, here's some stats for you. In eighteen ninety the
top one. And this they should all sound very familiar
if you're alive in breathing oxygen today. Right, But in
eighteen ninety the top one percent of the US owned
fifty one percent.

Speaker 4 (20:02):
Of all wealth. Yeah, dude, more than half of all wealth.

Speaker 1 (20:07):
Yeah, in that nuts, it is nuts, But you're right,
it does sound very familiar.

Speaker 2 (20:12):
The top twelve percent owned eighty six percent of all wealth,
and the lower forty four percent of the US population,
which was about half the population, owned one point two percent.

Speaker 3 (20:25):
And here's that's even more nuts.

Speaker 4 (20:27):
Well, I mean all these just top one another. I
think here's the last one.

Speaker 2 (20:31):
In eighteen ninety seven, the richest four 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.

Speaker 3 (20:45):
Yeah, how about that?

Speaker 1 (20:48):
So that is what you would call economic inequality, right,
And I think the thing is is especially over time.
But I get the impression during that age too, like
the people who resem that liberals typically 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

(21:09):
never will and it sickens you to see somebody else with.

Speaker 3 (21:12):
That money because you don't have it.

Speaker 1 (21:15):
And it's that second part, that last part about it,
because you don't have it, that I think misses the mark.
And that even at the time, during the gill Gilded Age, today,
when people look at it, inequality that kind of stuff,
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,

(21:35):
that level, that amount of disparity shouldn't exist, where 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, if they exist, then you shouldn't have
people who have that much amount of money. And that

(21:56):
was a sentiment in the Gilding Gilded Age as much too.
It wasn't like they didn't realize this was going on
at the time. The sentiment was very much like it
is today, except in the Gilded Age they did things
like form labor unions and strike 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

(22:19):
the past against people today.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
Yeah, And I think there's also a notion that the
more left leaning people or anti success, and that's that's
not true either. It's well, that's all I'm going to
say about that. That's just not true. It's just not true.
They're not said, they're not anti success. And I don't

(22:47):
think that every conservative thinks like, yeah, man, 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, right. I think
these are just broad brush things that keep the country divided.

Speaker 1 (23:03):
Yeah, absolutely, I think that the Yeah, I think both
sides misunderstand each other. Conservatives and liberals misunderstand each other
to a debilitating degree these days.

Speaker 4 (23:13):
Agreed.

Speaker 2 (23:14):
So let's get off that and let's go back to
the original the og 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.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
I don't know about thousands of years, but thousands pretty
close to pretty close.

Speaker 1 (23:36):
To eighth out. I'll give you that one. So apparently
along the Rhyan 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 Ryan River like really narrowed with high cliffs,
and you were easy prey for local nobility who wanted

(23:58):
to like set up toll booth basically and said you
need to give me some money if you want to
keep going, implying your goods along the Rhine.

Speaker 2 (24:05):
Yeah, and you had You couldn't just portage your steamship
up a mountain and over a mountain.

Speaker 4 (24:11):
You had to pay the piper.

Speaker 1 (24:14):
Plus they didn't exist at the time.

Speaker 4 (24:16):
What steamships? When did those come around?

Speaker 1 (24:22):
The early nineteenth century?

Speaker 2 (24:24):
You have a much better just general world timeline that
lives in your brain than I do.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
Well.

Speaker 1 (24:30):
I understand history perfectly and without any air delusions or
any of my opinions informing my vision of history as well.

Speaker 4 (24:39):
I think that's what you're known for sure.

Speaker 3 (24:44):
Uh wait, wait were you joking? Oh no, okay, good.

Speaker 2 (24:49):
I just always get the time periods confused, So I
rely on books and research like a big dumb dumb
so so do I?

Speaker 4 (24:56):
Yeah, no, but then you keep it in your brain.

Speaker 2 (24:58):
Mine just floats out like yous cartoons with birds flying
around people's head when they get knocked out.

Speaker 3 (25:04):
Chuck.

Speaker 1 (25:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
Those birds are always above my head. I don't have
to get hit with an anvil or a piano. So
the Ryan Gorge was one of those really narrow straits.
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

(25:34):
regulation meant that people would take advantage of that.

Speaker 4 (25:37):
It's crazy, same as it is today, and.

Speaker 3 (25:39):
It's almost like people are imperfect.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
Almost, And so these thieves would move into that gorge,
jam up those tolls, maybe just steal stuff if they
wanted to as well, and they were named the robber barons.

Speaker 4 (25:51):
That's where that term came from.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
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
way and make a living. That's right, and that became
like a really great description for some of the most
successful business tycoons of the nineteenth century. I think it

(26:16):
first popped up in an Atlantic article in eighteen seventy, Yeah,
where it didn't directly say that, it didn't say that
these guys are the new robber barons, but it's said
that the old robber barons of the Rhine Valley were
actually probably more honest than the new aristocracy of swindling millionaires.
So that's a big, big time burn. So even in

(26:39):
eighteen 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 Gilded Age really starting
to take off, and people had already identified that there
were some major issues developing.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (27:06):
Yeah, so weird.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
It is a little weird to to 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.

Speaker 3 (27:26):
In the line overall is.

Speaker 1 (27:28):
Kind of up moves upward towards something great, I think.

Speaker 4 (27:32):
But toward perfection.

Speaker 1 (27:34):
I wasn't Maybe I wasn't alive ten thousand years ago,
So who knows. Maybe that was the pinnacle of human existence.

Speaker 3 (27:42):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
Maybe, So should we can say, should we talk about
a few of these dudes?

Speaker 1 (27:47):
Yeah, so we I feel like we have kind of
set this up that the Robert Barons were ruthless business tycoons,
and we're going to start with one of the first ones,
Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who, for my money was the og
robber Baron.

Speaker 2 (28:04):
Yeah, and Commodore is a nickname that and as you
will see he later, Vanderbilt University is named for him,
and their mascot is the Commodores because of him. And
a commodore is a naval officer sort of above not
quite an admiral, but above a captain.

Speaker 4 (28:22):
I think they command a fleet.

Speaker 1 (28:24):
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 steamships to ferry
people around New York. I thoughts there were by this time,
and you know, you know what's ironic, We were talking

(28:45):
about steamships and when they were invented the guy who
invented steam, Robert Fulton. Remember we did a whole episode
on steam technology. H Yeah, he had a thirty year
monopoly in New York to ferry people using steamships, and ironically,
Cornelius Vanderbilt had to overcome that monopoly using ingenuity and

(29:08):
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, by improving the size of
the steam engine and using cheaper anthracite coal, he managed

(29:30):
to drop the average ferry price from like seven dollars
to three dollars in his first try.

Speaker 4 (29:36):
That's amazing.

Speaker 1 (29:37):
Yeah, so I think that's really kind of like instructive though,
man Like think about it. You think of this guy
as like a ruthless robber baron, and in many many
ways he was, as we'll see, but he was able
to get to that position by outwitting and outsmarting other
robber barons. And that was the climate at the time.
It's so easy to sit back from this time and

(29:59):
just be like, just judge, judge Hutch and it's actually
kind of fun too, it's a great pastime. But you
also have to remember at the time that that was
the business climate.

Speaker 3 (30:11):
That's just what it was.

Speaker 1 (30:12):
And if you weren't willing to do that, well, then
you were not going to make it in business. Which
is fine, Like maybe you'd say this is too cutthroat
for me. I'm just going to sell out to these guys,
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 or for worse.

Speaker 2 (30:30):
Yeah, and it's worth pointing out. 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 Cornelius Vanderbilt, even though that sounds like
such a rich, hoity toity name, now, he was born
very poor. He was born in seventeen ninety four in

(30:50):
a farming family on Statine Island and quit school when
he was eleven, and that's when he started working on
the boat docks. And he was literally a self made man,
starting with that first little ferry boat that you mentioned
at age fourteen. He was a big dude, and he
was very savvy, but also very ruthless. And this is

(31:13):
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

(31:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
So it makes you wonder, 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.

Speaker 3 (32:19):
Or was it that these guys shaped.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
The business world because they all happened to be alive
at the same time.

Speaker 4 (32:28):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
I wonder it's it's interesting though, that it's that competition
and again with the plane, to you, not just a
competition to succeed, but a comp competition to see that
others don't.

Speaker 3 (32:40):
Right, So, did you talk about the railroad?

Speaker 4 (32:43):
Did?

Speaker 3 (32:43):
I didn't catch it.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
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, I'd say easily like a third of them
were railroad men.

Speaker 1 (32:59):
Yeah, because because there was so much 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 got a cut of
every single industry because every single industry basically had to
use your form of transportation. That's why they all got

(33:22):
into it. Plus it was wide open, like there was
so much open space and so much room for expansion
that it was a good time to get rich off
of the railroad for sure.

Speaker 2 (33:31):
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 an
axle broke and went down an embankment and he punctured along,
broke some bones, and I guess was lying there wheezing

(33:53):
out of a hole in his lung saying, this is
the future. That was so great, And he got into railroads.
It's crazy, like a year later.

Speaker 3 (34:02):
Yeah, he did.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
And one of the things that he had a really
great talent for was identifying like loser railroads, seemingly loser railroads,
and figuring out ways that they actually had been overlooked.

Speaker 4 (34:15):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:15):
And a really good example of that is the Harlem Railroad,
which was just a short little line that other railroads,
larger railroads used to connect to New York City, but
Vanderbilt recognized that it was the only 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

(34:36):
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, it was worth in
today's money, one hundred and sixty eight dollars a share,
not too shabby, but from what I could tell at
the time, not very great at all. By the time

(34:57):
he was done cornering this stock, he had driven the
shares up to fifty nine hundred and ninety eight dollars
in just a few years. And so in doing so,
not only did he make a ton of money for himself,
he also developed this reputation that made owners of other

(35:18):
railroads say, I own a bunch of shares in my railroad.
You want to come buy mine and drive my stock
price off and then buy me out. And so eventually
he didn't even have to plunder other companies. They came
to him and just said, here, buddy, bias please.

Speaker 4 (35:32):
They were Blue Star Airlines.

Speaker 3 (35:35):
What is that? Remember that from that from there will
be blood.

Speaker 4 (35:38):
There were no airlines and there will be blood.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
No remember Wall Street, that was the one that Martin
Sheen worked for. Yeah, did geck O came in and
bought out and I think he shuddered them though, that
was the difference.

Speaker 3 (35:52):
Yeah, Yeah, he was a corporate raider.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
He and actually that era, that eighties junk bond era
is frequently cited or it was the time as the
Second Gilded Age.

Speaker 3 (36:02):
This is not the first time.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
We're living in what's known as the Second Guilded Age.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
So to put a bow on Vanderbilt, he consolidated, like
you said, all these railways between New York and Chicago.
He manipulated stock, he fixed prices like you said earlier,
the government wasn't looking so you 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,

(36:29):
turned into a philanthropist. Built Grand Central Station it was
called the Grand Central Depot at the time, which during
the recession provided tons and tons of jobs for people,
and then the Central University of Nashville was eventually renamed
Vanderbilt University.

Speaker 4 (36:47):
Because all he did was give him a million bucks.
Isn't that crazy?

Speaker 3 (36:51):
Is that right?

Speaker 4 (36:51):
I guess back then, that's a lot of.

Speaker 3 (36:52):
Money significant, sure, sure.

Speaker 2 (36:55):
Like I feel like we could get stuff you should know,
listeners to pitch in to get a university named after
for us.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
Let's try that, actually, stuff you should.

Speaker 1 (37:03):
You we could do. We could organize a struggling university.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
How about that?

Speaker 1 (37:09):
Hey, one more thing about Vanderbilt. So he left about
one hundred million dollars to his mostly to his eldest son, William.
In six years, William doubled that, mostly by investing in railroads.
That's how much money you could make in railroads. And
William was also well known for throwing probably the most
laviage party in the history of New York City. They

(37:31):
spent one point eight million dollars in today's dollars on
champagne alone.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah, that was when he finished his mansion on Fifth Ave.
And I looked it up because to see if any
of these robber baron mansions were still around today.

Speaker 4 (37:45):
But yeah, yeah, I don't think it. I mean, I
know this one was demolished in nineteen twenty six.

Speaker 1 (37:50):
So if you want to get a really good idea
of just how rich these people were, go to Newport,
Rhode Island man visit Millionaire's route because there was a
huge there's a huge overlooking this cliff. There's a long
row the most astounding mansions you've ever seen built during
the guilded one.

Speaker 2 (38:09):
Of the better walks you can take in life. It
really got the ocean on one side and then these
mansions on the other.

Speaker 1 (38:15):
It's really cool and each mansion, each mansion is so
different from the others.

Speaker 3 (38:19):
Just touring them is amazing. You could just be utterly.

Speaker 1 (38:22):
Disgusted by the concept of billionaires or robber barons or whatever,
and you can still 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, Newport's just one of the
more charming towns in the I love Newport.

Speaker 2 (38:38):
Or you could take a hate walk and just look
at those mansions and think about what would wrecking Ball
would look like.

Speaker 3 (38:45):
Shake your fists, set the dumb waiters and all that.

Speaker 4 (38:47):
But then you turn around, look at the ocean and think, oh, okay, all.

Speaker 1 (38:49):
Right, it's really cool. It's it's a definitely cool to
visit them, for sure.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
And by the way, a little piece of trivia if
you go if you enter Central Park at one 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.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
Is that right?

Speaker 4 (39:09):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (39:11):
So I mentioned Morganization, and that's actually named after the
next robber Baron we're going to talk about.

Speaker 2 (39:15):
Okay, do we break beforehand? And I think we break
after JP?

Speaker 3 (39:20):
How about that? Are you okay with that?

Speaker 4 (39:22):
Sure?

Speaker 1 (39:23):
Okay? So then we're going to hang in there, everybody,
don't don't fast forward yet. We're going to stick around
and talk about JP Morgan right now.

Speaker 4 (39:31):
Yeah, he was born with money.

Speaker 2 (39:33):
He did not come from meager means and work himself
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,
partnered with a guy named Anthony Drexel who was a
banker and from Philly and created Drexel Morgan and Company.

(39:57):
And it became one of the biggest investment bank at
the time in the world.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
Yeah, and this was when he was in his early thirties,
like you said, right, So JP Morgan was known as
the guy who financed all the other robber barons, and
he had his fingers in basically every pot that was
going on. He also knew that like you could make
money off of the railroads because you were taking a

(40:23):
cut of all the other industries, so he definitely got
involved in them. But his whole thing was what's called
horizontal integration, where 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 all holding one
another down. I'm going to slowly start buying them up.
And here's the thing. This is how you get control

(40:45):
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 form a bigger
company that's way leaner, has much better economies of scale,
and you can compete better against all the other guys.
So you start buying some of the other guys up
because they're facing going out of business now, and then

(41:06):
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 less than cost. Yeah, you're a big company,
so you can totally stand that for a much longer
time than these holdout competitors, and they face either financial

(41:29):
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,
which was I don't know if it was pioneered by
JP Morgan, but he definitely perfected it enough that they
named the process after him.

Speaker 2 (41:49):
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 in
that one company you were talking about that may be
kind of pretty small even, but they might hold have
an iron grip on one very tiny region of the
United States, and you could just let them have their business,

(42:13):
or you could do what you're talking about and make
sure that you squash them by any means necessary and
force them to sell. And that's I think that's where
capitalism for a lot of people has gotten its bad name.
Is like, yeah, work hard, succeed do well, but not

(42:35):
at the expense of every other person trying to do well.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
Right, because it interferes with something this country's based on,
which is called the quality of opportunity, which is the
idea that at least under the eyes of the law,
every 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

(42:59):
in monopoly or using underhanded tactics to run out the
competition so that there is no competition any longer, that
that is problematic. That flies in the face of the
idea of equality of opportunity.

Speaker 4 (43:12):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (43:13):
And if you listen to our Monopoly Game episode, you
might remember that JP Morgan was the basis of monopoly Man.

Speaker 4 (43:23):
Uncle Peter said, yeah, we talked about that.

Speaker 3 (43:25):
Good, Okay, that makes me feel good.

Speaker 4 (43:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (43:27):
He was modeled after old JP Morgan himself, and he
was actually one of the first people to be targeted
for anti trust in nineteen oh four, Eddie Roosevelt game
after him under the Sherman Anti Trust Act and said, hey,
this Northern Securities Corporation is really monopoly, and Supreme Court said, yeah,

(43:48):
it is busted up.

Speaker 1 (43:50):
Yeah, And so today when we think of trusts, we
think of, like, you know, a legal entity that can
hold assets. At the time, the word trust meant basically
an industry that had been morganized, where all of the
competitors had been folded into one large company and the
market was cornered by this one mega company, General Electric,

(44:13):
us Steel, both of those were morganized companies, and apparently
US Steel was the first one billion dollar company that
ever existed because of that level of consolidation. But then, yeah,
when the Sherman Anti Trust Act was passed in eighteen ninety,
that was a clear sign that this was not going
to stand much longer. And I think Roosevelt, it was Roosevelt,

(44:35):
you said, right, yeah, Teddy 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 the Elder Statesman and the Republican Party established
himself as a genuine president of the people and helped
set himself up for reelection just from that one anti
trust act.

Speaker 4 (44:56):
So that's jp. Now do we take a break.

Speaker 1 (45:01):
Oh one more thing, Chuck, Yeah, I'm not toying with you,
I swear.

Speaker 4 (45:05):
So.

Speaker 1 (45:05):
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 one of
the reasons he's reviled is because one of the ways
he made it so that he could compete with other
companies was in sell for lower than cost, was by
slashing wages, slashing the workforce and increasing productivity of the

(45:31):
existing workers, and then just making sure that working conditions.
He didn't spend a cent on improving working conditions to
make him safe, and that is really why not because
he amassed a fortune. Some people criticize him for that,
but it's tactics like that, like becoming a billionaire basically

(45:51):
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.

Speaker 3 (46:03):
Had with robber barons, is that kind of mentality.

Speaker 4 (46:05):
That's right.

Speaker 3 (46:07):
Now, I'm done.

Speaker 2 (46:07):
All right, we'll come back right after this and finish
up with two more robber barons. Hello, everybody, we're back

(46:38):
to talk about Andrew Carnegie. You've ever been to Carnegie
Hall or Carnegie Mellon University.

Speaker 4 (46:45):
I've been to both.

Speaker 3 (46:48):
You've been one of the university with you. That's right.

Speaker 4 (46:51):
We did a little job there one time. That was fun.

Speaker 2 (46:54):
I've been to Carnegie Hall. I ushered a show there.
I didn't usher. I passed up the playbills, which meant
I got to see the show for free, and I
saw the show.

Speaker 4 (47:05):
Oh man, it was one of those special nights.

Speaker 2 (47:07):
I got to see Beethoven's Ninth with the full orchestra
and German choir at Carnegie Hall.

Speaker 4 (47:14):
It was amazing.

Speaker 3 (47:16):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (47:16):
Something else that's pretty neat And all I needed was
a bow tie?

Speaker 3 (47:21):
Is that the one that's d d d d ding
ding ding ding didn't.

Speaker 4 (47:28):
Know, maybe had named it wrong.

Speaker 2 (47:29):
It's the uh dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun.

Speaker 3 (47:33):
Oh, the die Hard song.

Speaker 4 (47:35):
Yeah, the Diehard song.

Speaker 3 (47:36):
I got you.

Speaker 4 (47:37):
I went and saw a Dieharden concert. It was great, hilarious,
so Carnegie.

Speaker 2 (47:43):
Uh, we're talking about Andrew Carnegie, who was born in
Scotland and they came to Pittsburgh.

Speaker 4 (47:51):
He was very poor.

Speaker 2 (47:53):
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 come to play later.

Speaker 1 (48:10):
His favorite one was Flowers in the Attic.

Speaker 4 (48:12):
Wow. I would have thought great expectations, but that's okay.

Speaker 3 (48:15):
No, nope.

Speaker 1 (48:17):
So he he, like Vanderbilt, is 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 steel because again remember steel is
like the basically the foundation for this American economy just

(48:38):
blowing up.

Speaker 4 (48:38):
And he was at Pittsburgh.

Speaker 1 (48:40):
Sure, so he his name became synonymous with steel, and
I guess at first, up until about eighteen ninety two,
he had a reputation as being a friend of the worker,
and that the workers at Carnegie Steel in Homestead, just
across the river from Pittsburgh, they they felt like, you know,

(49:01):
Carnegie would take care of them, and they found out
the hard way that that was not the case when
they went on strike in eighteen ninety two during what
came to be known as the Homestead Strike, which would
result in the death of ten people, which is not
how they planned things to go. And apparently the reason
why that happened is because the Pinkertons were called in

(49:21):
as strike breakers.

Speaker 4 (49:23):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
I might want to eventually do an episode on this,
but that's sort of the overview. You bring in the
Pinkertons and then they battle with the like literally with guns.
Pinkertons died. I think like eight or nine of the
ten or twelve people that died with the Pinkertons.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
No, no, I think it was just one. I think
were the strikers.

Speaker 2 (49:44):
Yeah, okay, well we should definitely do a full episode then,
because for.

Speaker 4 (49:48):
Sure I want to get this right.

Speaker 1 (49:50):
But what I read was that the strikers, so the
Pinkertons showed up in barges and they were basically hired
on as a private army to protect scab workers and
bust the strike up. 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 Pinkertons

(50:14):
come off the boats and the Pinkertons So the Pinkertons 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 Pinkertons escaped to the factory with their
life and the National Guard was called in to quell

(50:38):
the violence.

Speaker 4 (50:39):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:39):
Well, 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 his own
little personal army to help take care of things.

Speaker 1 (50:50):
Right, starting with the Pinkertons 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 regulation
is concerned, but they'll totally send in the National Guard
not just to qwelve violence, but to make sure that
the strike breakers don't attack the scab labor to keep
the factory going, and that kind of like government capital

(51:15):
collusion at the expense of the workers. Is that there's
a long standing tradition of that being almost universally reviled
in America.

Speaker 3 (51:25):
Over enough of an arc of time.

Speaker 1 (51:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (51:41):
Yeah, And I think Carnegie tried to distance himself from
that strike by saying that he 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

(52:05):
big time philanthropist later in life. I think he said
in his book The Gospel of Wealth, the man who
dies thus rich dies disgraced. And we mentioned the libraries
coming back into play. He built more than twenty five
hundred libraries, and that's really one of his big legacies,

(52:26):
along with the arts. The Carnegie Corporation and the Endowment
for International Peace, Carnegie Mellon University, Carnegie Museum. But the
libraries really have made a pretty big difference in this country.

Speaker 3 (52:39):
They really have, for sure.

Speaker 1 (52:40):
And he was one of just the all time great
philanthropists in American history, for sure, but he still pales
in comparison to the all time top record holder philanthropist
John D. Rockefeller, who is also a Robert Baron. But
he also is far away America's most prolific and generous

(53:04):
benefactor for sure. He was also one of the most
visionary philanthropists of all time too.

Speaker 2 (53:11):
Yeah, and some people say that he was, you know,
if you just account for money and inflation, the richest
man ever to live. I'm not sure how they calculate that,
because his nine hundred million dollar peek in nineteen twelve
is about twenty three billion today.

Speaker 3 (53:29):
So here I saw how you ready?

Speaker 1 (53:31):
I'm sure it's yeah, go ahead, if you do his
wealth relative to the total economic output, Yeah, it's an
even larger figure than gross domestic product.

Speaker 4 (53:41):
I had a feeling it was something like that.

Speaker 1 (53:43):
His wealth represented two percent of the total economic output
of the United States at the time. To have that
value today, you would have to be worth about three
hundred and fifty billion, Okay, and I think Jeff Bezos
is worth one hundred and forty or something like that.

Speaker 2 (54:00):
Yeah, And I think we didn't even mention it was
it Carnegie that had at one point, like one dollar
of every twenty dollars in circulation.

Speaker 4 (54:10):
Was his.

Speaker 3 (54:12):
Yeah, that's right, that was Carnegie for sure.

Speaker 4 (54:14):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:14):
I mean these numbers are staggering, for sure, for people
like Rockefeller and Carnegie.

Speaker 4 (54:19):
It's just it's unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (54:21):
But the thing is, in like, like John D. Rockefeller
was a ruthless, 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

(54:44):
at nine hundred million, like you said, when he died,
he had he'd given 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 learned
very early on that it was every man's religious duty
to make as much money as you possibly can and

(55:07):
then to give away as much money as you possibly
can too, And he apparently lived that even before he
was wealthy, when he was still just.

Speaker 3 (55:15):
An average worker.

Speaker 1 (55:17):
Yeah, he would give away something like ten percent of
all of his paychecks. So he was a philanthropist his
whole life, for sure. He was still a robber bearing too.

Speaker 2 (55:24):
Though, Yeah, and his whole you know, of course, oil
was his business. Standard oil it was just a goliath,
and there were a bunch of big like sort of
like the railroads. It was oil and 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.

Speaker 4 (55:46):
By the early.

Speaker 2 (55:47):
Nineteen hundreds, they controlled more than ninety percent of the
oil market. Can you imagine ninety percent.

Speaker 1 (55:55):
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 at 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. The different railroads
in the area who were shipping all this oil. To say,

(56:16):
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 volume. That
makes sense, but they also had to get his business,
and he had so much business that they would do this.
The railroads had to tax and added tax on all
of his competitors, so they paid an extra twenty to

(56:37):
thirty cents a 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, they actually

(56:58):
gave him a kickback 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.

Speaker 4 (57:15):
It's amazing it is.

Speaker 2 (57:18):
Let me see, he gave seventy five million away to
the University of Chicago. Well, it kind of founded the
University of Chicago with that money.

Speaker 1 (57:27):
Also Spellman too, which was established to educate freed slaves.
He bankrolled Spellman for its founding as well.

Speaker 2 (57:37):
And in one of our best and most favored episodes,
you might remember the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission helped eradicate hookworm
in the South.

Speaker 1 (57:46):
Yeah, totally. That is one of our better episodes for sure.

Speaker 2 (57:50):
So those are just four of the sort of most
famous and some might say notorious.

Speaker 4 (57:57):
Robert Barons big long list.

Speaker 2 (58:00):
You could throw Henry Ford in there, John Jacob Astor,
Charles Schwab, Andrew Mellon, Jay Gould, Yeah, I looked at
I was thinking about J. Paulgetty, but he was later
on he wouldn't have qualified.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
So some of these guys had some terrible quotes too
that also just made them despised through history. Carnegie said
that it's not the man who does the work who
gets rich, it's the man who gets other men to
do the work. Yeah, which is not a very tasteful
thing to say when you're ultra wealthy and breaking strikes
with guns. That Jay Gould guy I mentioned, he said

(58:35):
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 some terrible pr and because of that,
a lot of people have said, like, well, I wonder

(58:56):
if some of the ultra wealthy industrialists are in or
people who basically the billionaires who are leading the world today,
are they just like Robert Barons with better pr and
better marketing. Maybe, And apparently supposedly that's not necessarily the case.

Speaker 3 (59:12):
And here's why.

Speaker 1 (59:14):
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,
kind of anti capitalist tactics to get those wealth and

(59:37):
they did it on the backs of workers that they
took advantage of and didn't pay very well and killed
in their workplaces. Basically, but the reason that America is
still powerful today is because of the work that these
guys did of the industries that they created. Public schooling
came about and was just kind of became widespread to

(01:00:00):
people for the jobs that these guys created, 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. Too. That flies in the face, with
kind of the exception of Bill Gates. It flies in
the face of the people who are around today that

(01:00:23):
not only are they not great philanthropists necessarily. I'm looking
at Steve Jobs, who wasn't around anymore, but definitely was
not a good philanthropist in his life. He is now,
his family is, but he wasn't when he was alive.
That's a big, big mark against 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

(01:00:47):
presiding over a decline, a decline in wages, decline in
living conditions, whereas these guys, these captains of industry and
the robber barons for the nineteenth century, they were presiding
over a rise, like an improved in the way that
America lived and the standard of living. The kind of
the polar opposite, even though the inequality is roughly the same.

Speaker 3 (01:01:11):
Very interesting, I think so too.

Speaker 1 (01:01:14):
I also wonder though too if this inequality will usher
in a second progressive era, which it seems like it
has all of the markings to do that too, So
we need to do a progressive era episode too sometime. Okay, deal,
all right, Well, since you said deal, Chuck, I think
that's time for a listener mail.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
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 knowing. All right, this is from Jack Glick. Hey, guys,
love the show. Been listening for five years or so,
and to make sure not to miss any new episodes,
I'm listening to the one on Macha when you started

(01:01:53):
to talk about marijuana.

Speaker 4 (01:01:55):
Decided to get in touch.

Speaker 2 (01:01:56):
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.
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

(01:02:19):
the ultrasound episode. I thought you might like to know
that how outdated and implicitly offensive marijuana is, and I'd
like to encourage you to use the word.

Speaker 4 (01:02:28):
Cannabis when referring to it in the future. All the best,
keep it up. That is from Jack Glick.

Speaker 1 (01:02:35):
That is a great name, Jack, great job, great name,
great email from a great guy.

Speaker 4 (01:02:40):
I assume sounds like a great guy.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
If you want to show off what a great person
you are, you can email us yourself like Jack Glick did.

Speaker 3 (01:02:49):
Man what a great name.

Speaker 1 (01:02:50):
You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom
and send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 4 (01:02:59):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:03:02):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.