By contrast, historian Priscilla Roberts argues that Nevins' studies of inventors and businessmen brought about a reassessment of American industrialization and its leaders. Business journalist Ferdinand Lundberg later criticized Nevins for confusing readers. Gilded Age capitalists, according to Nevins, sought to impose order and stability on competitive business, and that their work made the United States the foremost economy by the 20th century. He argued that while Rockefeller may have engaged in some unethical and illegal business practices, this should not overshadow his bringing order to industrial chaos of the day. Rockefeller: The Heroic Age of American Enterprise (2 vols., 1940), took on Josephson. Business historian Allan Nevins challenged this view of big businessmen by advocating the "Industrial Statesman" thesis. However a counterattack by academic historians began as the Depression ended. This scholarship, and the cultural persuasion of which it was an expression, drew on a deeply rooted sensibility–partly religious, partly egalitarian and democratic–that stretched back to William Jennings Bryan, Andrew Jackson and Tom Paine. īy the Great Depression of the 1930s, Fraser continues:īiographies of Mellon, Carnegie and Rockefeller were often laced with moral censure, warning that 'tories of industry' were a threat to democracy and that parasitism, aristocratic pretension and tyranny have always trailed in the wake of concentrated wealth, whether accumulated dynastically or more impersonally by the faceless corporation. Godkin, founder of The Nation, launched a volley of invective at the new plutocracy: 'kings of the street' like Vanderbilt displayed 'unmitigated and immitigable selfishness' as appalling as their 'audacity, push, unscrupulousness and brazen disregard of others' rights'. However, Fraser goes on, there was a minority who vehemently dissented:Ī minority were irate and excoriated the titans of finance and industry as 'robber barons' and worse. The one man to whom the community owes most is the capitalist, that the menu gives, but the man who saves and invests, so that his property reproduces and multiplies itself instead of being consumed. It is now known that the desire to own property is the chief difference between the Savage and the enlightened man that aggregations of money in the hands of individuals are in inestimable blessing to Society, for without them there could be no public improvements or private enterprises, no railroads or steamships, or telegraphs no cities, the leisure class, no schools, colleges, literature, art – in short, no civilization. Historian Stephen Frazier argues that probably most Americans admired Vanderbilt they agreed with biographer William Augustus Croffut who wrote in 1886: Yet the newer who gathered the most attention was railroader Cornelius Vanderbilt. As the United States industrialized very rapidly after the Civil War, a few hundred prominent men made large fortunes by building and controlling major industries, such as railroads, shipping, steel, mining and banking. Main article: Robber baron (industrialist)Įven before academic studies began, Americans were enthralled by the Robber baron debate.
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