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Hey everybody it's me Josh and for this week's select I've chosen our July 2020 episode on robber barons it turns out that today's billionaires and leaders of industry bear 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 the last century were far less preoccupied with outer space hope you enjoy this episode it's a pretty good one welcome to stuff you should know a production of iheart radio hey and welcome to the podcast i'm josh clark there's charles w chuck chuckers
bryant over there jerry was just here doing the covid setup and then got out of the room really quick held her breath for five straight minutes.
It's a new record. It really is.
A new studio record.
Sure. And this is Stuff You Should Know.
That's no David Blaine record, by the way.
No, I mean, that's her studio record.
You should see her when she's pearl diving, though.
Right. 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.
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 or one of the worst things to ever happen to this country.
Yeah, yeah, and at first, from what I could tell, historians like immediately after in the like few decades after um the the gilded age which we'll talk about where the you know the age the robber barons worked and operated and lived in um really took it to be like their their presence their existence
was one of the worst things ever but over time there's kind of been a reformation of them you know kind of like a revisiting of them that has tried to to to revive their image or actually make their image possibly better than it ever has been yeah i mean it kind of 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 those guys
gave a ton of money to society before they died.
And so that's all, it justifies the means.
Yeah, I actually ran across.
That's one way to look at it.
Yeah, that's the conservative way to look at it.
And I ran across something, I can't remember what it'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 because it will always be imperfect and end in ruin, that that is a cornerstone, a hallmark of conservatism?
Did you know that? I didn't, but I mean, of course you can't make a perfect society.
It makes sense. Well, so conservatives are saying that in opposition to all of the liberal, um, efforts to make a perfect society, to have government regulation that says, no, no, no, we should all have clean water and we should do it at the expense of making corporations clean up the wastewater before
they, they release their waste into the, the shared common water resources, things like that.
Right. And that there's this idea that you can, you can mold society into, uh, some perfect form that that's the opposite it 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 44 years now.
And I had no idea that it was just that simple.
And it really kind of is.
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.
I think the goal is to make things better.
Yeah. Yeah, agreed.
I don't know that it's a great word either, but I think that that's, you know, I mean, hey, you're going to argue with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy?
I'm not. I'll bring it on, man.
I'll punch that thing right in the face.
Speaking of Stanford, did you know that Stanford University was endowed and funded?
Yeah, a robber baron named Leland Stanford, actually.
Yeah, a lot of universities are named after robber barons.
Yeah, there's a lot of problems with some of the early histories of universities, as we'll find out in the coming weeks.
So, we should get into the Gilded Age.
We should hop in the old 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?
A gilded lily, isn't that another thing people gild?
I don't know. That's a pretty good band name, though.
Gilded Lily? Yeah, like a 90s power pop.
Oh, totally. You nailed it.
And I said, what about Breakfast at Tiffany's?
But the Gilded Age is, and Dave Bruce helped us put this together, and he points out it's not a term of endearment.
When something is gilded, that means it's got a thin coating of gold, but underneath it's, you know, it could be a gilded turd.
Sure. I hate that word so much.
I love it. It's so great.
Do you? Oh, man, I hate it.
I mean, I love it and how awful it is.
Oh, gotcha. But I think it's so awful, it, like, comes out on the other side 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.
But when was this? So this was the second half of the 19th century, basically, from pretty much the end of the Civil War.
up until the first decade of the 20th century.
And it was characterized by a huge, massive shift in the American economy where I saw somewhere that at some point in the 1860s to some point in the early 1880s, in about 15 years, the American economy doubled in size in 15 years.
That's how massive it was, and that's how fast it happened.
And what it was was a transition from an agrarian society to an industrial society, and it happened virtually overnight as far as history goes.
Yeah, and it was because it happened so quickly and because it was such growth, I think the government was like, we're going to stay out of this and kind of just let you dudes do what you're going to do.
No regulation. You can be as competitive as you want to be, and you can satisfy, 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.
Right. So that kind of raises something that I saw is that the idea that it's kind of like a myth of the laissez -faire government during this era.
They were definitely laissez -faire when it comes to regulation and letting corporatists run roughshod over labor.
but they were anything but hands -off when it came to corporate welfare and political entrepreneurship and helping out the wealthy class at the expense of the people in general.
So on one hand they were laissez -faire, on the other they were not.
Yeah, and what we're talking about is stuff like snatching up resources where you could, hoarding them for yourself, of 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 you could have people work harder for less and less wages, that kind of thing.
Right, exactly. And what's crazy, like it was a dog -eat -dog economy.
It was just nuts how it happened.
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 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.
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.
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.
Yeah. I mean let's talk about the Gilded Age and the – I guess just – you owe it all to trains really and trains you owe to steel.
So you got to go back a little bit.
Right. Steel was a very big deal in that when they found out – Mr.
Henry Bessemer in the 1850s found out how to make steel like a lot cheaper.
He got a new process going where it was just like making vast amounts of steel for a fraction of 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, Cincinnati was known for furniture.
And obviously in places like Wyoming, you had coal and you had copper in Montana and you had a lot of timber in Oregon.
and you could get that stuff anywhere you wanted to go and that changed everything.
Yeah, not only could you get it to where you wanted to go, you could do it exponentially cheaper than it used to be 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, they're just known for it.
That's their mascot, I believe, of the baseball team.
Yeah, the sitters. Right.
Not only did you have the town of Cincinnati and maybe some other regional parts of Ohio as your market, you now had 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 at really high RPM for a little while before this.
apparently the war of 1812 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, that was a big one, and then the Civil War had
brought a lot of factories online in the north that hadn't been there before, and so when the Civil War ended these factories were all ready to go, and with the abundance of plentiful steel, that engine got put into gear and it just kind of took off like a rocket.
Yeah. When I was reading this and I tried to find out, but I couldn't really get a firm hold.
I wondered if back then when this started to happen, you know how people rail against global trade and the globalization.
I wonder if people railed against nationalization of commerce back then, or if they all just thought it was all great.
No, no. 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 and the political process and agitating for what they wanted.
And so if there were people who were definitely in favor of this kind of just taking off like a rocket, knitting the country together, that kind of stuff, nationalization, Then there was definitely opposition parties to that, too.
I figure. Who saw the problems with it.
But the cool thing is that everybody was involved and everybody was, like, they cared about the direction the country was going rather than just sitting back and being like, well, nothing we can do about it.
I wonder, though, if it was, like, if there were business—like, if there were furniture makers in Cincinnati going, I don't want to sell my chairs out there.
That is not what they sound like in Cincinnati, too.
Is that not a Cincinnati accent?
No. Okay. I might be thinking of Maine.
Right. But I wonder who is opposing it.
I don't know. I don't know.
I haven't seen that one.
Some of the things that I saw were 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, so the farmers wanted, I think they wanted easy money.
I can't remember who wanted 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.
I thought you were talking about the Rodney Dangerfield movie.
That was easy money?
Man, that is a tawdry movie.
It was, wasn't it? Yeah, it was good, though.
Yeah. Hey, even the worst Dangerfield movie is 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 Vernon Shirley lately.
Man, that is some comfort food, isn't it?
Dude, they are, but not only that, it's not like junk food, though.
They're like well -written, well -acted, well -directed TV shows.
It's Gary Marshall.
It's not at all like throwaway or disposable.
It doesn't rely on slick special effects or anything like that.
It's just good stuff, man.
Yeah, I agree. And you know what?
Since we're on this tangent, we should tell everyone that we're writing a book and it's coming out this fall.
Yeah. It's called Stuff You Should Know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things.
And you can preorder it now if you want a special custom poster.
Yeah. You preorder it and you can go and upload your receipt at stuffyoushouldreadbooks .com.
And then there's like a little thing that says, like, get your preorder 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.
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.
Yes. We're glad that the railroad exists so we can move these books around easily.
Oh, man. You ain't kidding.
Ship these things to Cincinnati.
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.
The immigrants were pouring in from Europe.
African -Americans were going north because Reconstruction didn't work out so well.
Yeah, because it got abandoned.
Yeah, yeah. Have we done one on Reconstruction?
No, no. We really need to, though.
Totally. I mean, the more I've been reading a lot about that period in history, and yes, we need to definitely do one on that.
But the point is there are a lot of people flocking to work this what was called the second industrial revolution where we saw over a period of about 40 years factory output went from $1 .9 billion to $13 billion.
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 history of the world as far as I know.
I believe it. Should we take a break?
Oh, sure. I was just getting revved up.
My own economic engine's idling high 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.
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All right, we're back, Charles.
I'm feeling much better now that my foot's off the gas.
That was just good advice.
Well, I mentioned Mark Twain, and the only reason we're going to talk about Mark Twain for a moment is because in 1873, 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 the second
industrial revolution?
Yeah, totally. It's exactly that kind of migration that you were talking about just a few minutes ago.
And it didn't work out so well, right?
I don't know. No, I've never read the book, but from what I can tell, no, it didn't work out very well because he is taken advantage of by all manner of bad people like crooked politicians and crooked businessmen and is basically run through the wringer from what I can tell.
But I've also seen that it wasn't exactly the best piece of writing Mark Twain's ever come up with.
But the thing is that he released this in 1873.
Yeah. And this is like at the very beginning of the Gilded Age.
So he saw it pretty quickly what was going on.
And what he saw was this emergence from a relatively egalitarian society of a group of ultra mind -bogglingly wealthy people that just rose up from the United States.
And through, you know, cheating and business acumen and taking advantage of people and overworking people and underpaying people, but also like having a lot of vision and foresight, all 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 be known as the robber barons.
And they were the linchpin of why people think of the Gilded Age as a rotten part of American history.
Yeah, here's some stats for you.
In 1890, the top one—and these should all sound very familiar if you're alive and breathing oxygen today.
Right. But in 1890, the top 1 % of the U .S.
owned 51 % of all wealth.
Yeah. Dude, more than half of all wealth.
Yeah. Isn't that nuts?
It is nuts, but you're right.
It does sound very familiar.
The top 12 % owned 86 % of all wealth.
And the lower 44 % of the U .S.
population, which was about half the population, owned 1 .2%.
That's even more nuts.
Well, I mean, all of these just top one another, I think.
Here's the last one.
In 1897, the richest 4 ,000 families, that sounds like a lot of people, but that's less than 1 % of the population.
The richest 4 ,000 had as much wealth as the other 11 .6 million families combined.
Yeah. How about that?
So that is what you would call economic inequality, right?
And I think the thing is, especially over time, but I get the impression during that age too, like the people who resent 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 never will and it sickened you
to see somebody else with that money because you don't have it and it's that second part that last part about because you don't have it that i think misses the mark and that even at the time during the gilded gilded age today when people look at inequality that kind of stuff what there 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 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 was a sentiment in the 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 a criticism that's levied or has been levied in the past against people today.
Yeah, and I think there's also a notion that the more left -leaning people are anti -success.
And that's not true either.
Well, that's all I'm going to say about that.
That's just not true.
It's just not true.
They're not anti -success.
Yes. And I don't 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 anyone's head that you want to get there.
Right. I think these are just broad brush things that keep the country divided.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that.
Yeah, I think most both sides misunderstand each other.
Conservatives and liberals misunderstand each other to a debilitating degree these days.
Agreed. So, let's get off that and let's go back to the original, the OG robber barons who were not these guys.
I'm talking about the term robber baron, which didn't happen in the 19th century U .S.
for the first time.
It happened thousands of years ago in Europe.
i don't know about thousands of years but a thousand pretty close to pretty close to eighth i'll give you that one so um apparently along the rhine river if you wanted to move goods up and down northern europe like that was your your way to go but unfortunately for you there were places where the rhine
river like really narrowed with high cliffs and you were easy prey for local nobility who wanted to, like, set up toll booths, basically, and said, you need to give me some money if you want to keep going and plying your goods along the Rhine.
Yeah, and you couldn't just portage your steamship up a mountain and over a mountain.
You had to pay the piper.
Plus, they didn't exist at the time.
What, steam ships? When did those come around?
The early 19th century.
You have a much better just general world timeline that lives in your brain than I do.
Well, I understand history perfectly and without any delusions or any of my opinions informing my vision of history as well.
I think that's what you're known for.
Sure. Wait, wait, were you joking?
Oh, no. Okay, good.
I always get the time periods confused, so I rely on books and research like a big dum -dum.
So do I. Yeah, no, but then you keep it in your brain.
Mine just floats out like it.
You ever see these cartoons with birds flying around people's heads when they get knocked out?
Chuck, I've seen every cartoon that ever existed, and I remember each of them perfectly.
And without any of my opinions coloring my view of them.
Those birds are always above my head.
I don't have to get hit with an anvil or a piano.
So the Rhine Gorge was one of those really narrow straits.
And in 1250, Emperor Frederick III died.
There was no successor, and basically that meant no regulation.
And believe it or not, even way back then, a lack of regulation meant that people would take advantage of that.
That's crazy. Same as it is today.
It's almost like people are imperfect.
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.
That's where that term came from, those people.
Yeah, because they actually were like low -level nobility and they already were well off.
But that didn't prevent them from, you know, trying to take advantage of the merchant class who were just trying to make their 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 19th century.
I think it first popped up in an Atlantic article in 1870.
Yeah. Where it didn't directly say that, it didn't say that these guys are the new robber barons, but it said that the old robber barons of the Rhine Valley were actually probably more honest than the new aristocracy of swindling millionaires.
Burn. So it's a big, big time burn.
So even in 1870, 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.
Yeah, it's so weird to look at this stuff and just how apt it applies to what's going on today.
And we think, I think some people think that these are all new problems and new issues, but it's as old as time, you know.
Yeah. So weird. It is a little weird to—it is weird.
What's even weirder, though, is, like, I believe 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.
Sure. And the line overall is kind of up—moves upward toward something great, I think, but— Toward perfection?
I was—maybe. Maybe.
I wasn't alive 10 ,000 years ago, so who knows?
Maybe that was the pinnacle of human existence.
I don't know. Yeah, maybe.
Who can say? Should we talk about a few of these dudes?
Yeah, so I feel like we have kind of set this up, that the robber 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.
Yeah, and Commodore is a nickname that—and as you will see, 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.
I think they command a fleet.
Oh, well, that's actually pretty appropriate because he did command a fleet of ships, originally sailboats, originally a sailboat, I think, when he was 14.
And then steamships to ferry people around New York.
I thought there were no steamships.
There were by this time.
And, you know, what's ironic, we were talking about steamships and when they were invented.
The guy who invented steam, Robert Fulton.
Remember we did a whole episode on steam technology?
Yeah, yeah. He had a 30 -year monopoly in New York to ferry people using steamships.
That's right. And ironically, Cornelius Vanderbilt had to overcome that monopoly using ingenuity and his own resourcefulness and eventually was successful in breaking that monopoly just through good business tactics that actually resulted in far lower fares for everyday people and companies.
I think just at his first try by improving the size of the steam engine and using cheaper anthracite coal, he managed to drop the average ferry price from like $7 to $3 in his first try.
That's amazing. 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 by outwitting and outsmarting other robber barons and that was the climate at the time like it's so easy to sit back from this time and just be like just judge judge judge and it's actually kind of fun too it's a great pastime but you you also have to remember
at the time um that was that was the business climate that's just what it was and if you weren't willing to do that, well, then you were not going to make it in 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.
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 1794 in a farming family on Staten Island and quit school when he was 11.
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 14 he was a big dude and he was very savvy but also very ruthless he and this is something that you'll see with a lot of these men was a competition and a competitive edge and nature right 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 uh daniel plainview was very much based on some of these robber barons yeah and 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 so it makes you wonder like is that just a normal there's just at any given time there's a you know a handful or a multiplicity of people
who are like that it's just that these guys happen to be living in a time where they had the freedom and ability to exercise that to their to their greatest ability or was it that these guys shaped the the business world because they all happen to be alive at the same time i don't know i wonder it's
it's interesting though it's that competition and again with the plane view not just a competition to succeed but a compass competition to see that others don't right so um did you talk about the railroad yet i didn't catch it no so you know he started off in the steam uh steamboats but if you know
vanderbilt you know he was a railroad guy and if you look at the list of robber barons I'd say easily like a third of them were railroad men.
Yeah, 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 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.
So his first railroad ride was at 39 years old.
He wasn't like in his 20s and early 30s getting into the railroad business.
He wasn't even on a train until he was almost 40.
And that train crashed.
An axle broke and went down an embankment.
And he punctured a lung, broke some bones, and I guess was lying there, wheezing 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.
Yeah, he did. 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.
Yeah. And a really good example of that is the Harlem Railroad, which is 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 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 $168 a share.
Not too shabby, but from what I could tell at the time, not very great at all.
By the time he was done cornering this stock, he had driven the shares up to $5 ,998 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 railroads say, I own a bunch of shares in my railroad.
You want to come buy mine and drive my stock price up 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, buy us, please.
They were Blue Star Airlines.
What is that? Remember that from Wall Street?
Was that from their will be blood?
No, there were no airlines in there will be blood.
Now remember Wall Street?
That was the one that Martin Sheen worked for that Gekko came in and bought out.
And I think he shuttered them though.
That was the difference.
Yeah. Yeah. He was a corporate raider.
And actually that era, the 80s junk bond era is frequently cited or it was at the time as the second gilded age.
So this is not the first time we're living in what's known as the second gilded age.
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. He, like you said earlier, the government wasn't looking, so you could kind of do what you wanted.
And he became a very, very, very wealthy man, and like a lot of these guys, late in his life, turned into a philanthropist, 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 because all he did was give them a million bucks.
Isn't that crazy? Is that right?
I guess back then that's a lot of money.
By the time I mean that's significant.
Sure, sure. Like I feel like we could get Stuff You Should Know listeners to pitch in and get a university named after us.
Let's try that actually.
Like Stuff You Should Know You.
Yeah, we could do a—we can organize a struggling university.
How about that? Hey, one more thing about Vanderbilt.
So he left about $100 million mostly to his eldest son, William.
In six years, William doubled that, mostly by investing in railroads.
That's how much money you can make in railroads.
And William was also well -known for throwing probably the most lavish party in the history of New York City.
They spent $1 .8 million in today's dollars on champagne alone.
Yeah, that was when he finished his mansion on Fifth Ave.
And I looked it up to see if any of these robber baron mansions were still around today.
Oh, yeah. I don't think it—I mean, I know this one was demolished in 1926.
So if you want to get a really good idea of just how rich these people were, go to Newport, Rhode Island and visit Millionaires Row.
Because there was a huge, overlooking this cliff, there's a long row of the most astounding mansions you've ever seen built during the Gilded Age.
It's one of the better walks you can take in life.
It really is. Because you've got the ocean on one side and then these mansions on the other.
It's really cool. And each mansion is so different from the others.
Just touring them is amazing.
You could just be utterly disgusted by the concept of billionaires or robber barons or whatever.
and you can still enjoy taking this tour of these mansions.
They're just works of art, you know?
I agree. It's really worth a visit.
Plus, Newport's just one of the more charming towns in the country.
I love Newport. Or you could take a hate walk and just look at those mansions and think about what a wrecking ball would look like.
Shake your fists at the dumbwaiters and all that.
But then you turn around and look at the ocean and think, oh, okay, all right.
It's really cool. It's definitely cool to visit them for sure.
And by the way, a little piece of trivia, If you go, if you enter Central Park at the 105th Street entrance, that big, beautiful iron gate was from that mansion, the Vanderbilt mansion.
They donated a lot of the stuff before they demolished it.
Is that right? Yeah.
So I mentioned Morganization, and that's actually named after the next Robert Barron we're going to talk about, okay?
Do we break beforehand and tease that?
No, I think we break after JP.
How about that? Are you okay with that?
Sure. Okay. So then we're going to hang in there, everybody.
Don't fast forward yet.
We're going to stick around and talk about J .P.
Morgan right now. Yeah.
He was born with money.
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 plum job at Wall Street when he was 20 years old.
And then when he was in his 30s, he partnered with a guy named Anthony Drexel who was a banker from Philly and created Drexel Morgan & Company.
And it became one of the biggest investment banks at the time in the world.
Yeah, and this was when he was in his early 30s, like you said, right?
So J .P. 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 you could make money off of the railroads because you were taking a 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 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 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.
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 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 megacompany, 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.
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 have an iron grip on one very tiny region of the United States.
And you could just let them have their business or you could do what you're talking about and make sure that you 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 at the expense of every other person trying to do well.
Right, because it interferes with something this country is based on, which is called the quality of opportunity, which is the idea that at least under the eyes of the law, every single person in America has an equal shot at making it, at making something of themselves, of having like a good life.
And when somebody is cheating or engaging in monopolies or using underhanded tactics to run out the competition so that there is no competition any longer, that is problematic.
That flies in the face of the idea of equality of opportunity.
That's right. And if you listen to our Monopoly game episode, you might remember that J .P.
Morgan was the basis of Monopoly man, Uncle Pennybags.
Yeah, we talked about that.
Good, okay. That makes me feel good.
Yeah, he was modeled after old J .P.
Morgan himself. And he was actually one of the first people to be targeted for antitrust.
In 1904, Teddy Roosevelt came after him under the Sherman Antitrust Act and said, hey, this Northern Securities Corporation is really monopoly.
And the Supreme Court said, yeah, it is.
Bust it up. Yeah, and so today when we think of trusts, we think of, like, you know, legal entity that can hold assets.
At the time, the word trust meant basically an industry that had been more organized where all of the competitors had been folded into one large company and the market was cornered by this one mega company, General Electric, U .S.
Steel. Both of those were more organized companies, and apparently U .S.
Steel was the first $1 billion company that ever existed because of that level of consolidation.
But then, yeah, when the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890, that was a clear sign that this was not going to stand much longer.
And I think Roosevelt, it was Roosevelt, 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 elder statesman in the Republican Party, established himself as a genuine president of the people and helped set himself up for reelection just from that one antitrust act so that's jp
now do we take a break oh one more thing chuck yeah i'm not toying with you i swear so one one of the ways that morgan one of the reasons he's reviled still and he did some philanthropy probably more than he gets credit it for for sure but um 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 um and sell for lower than than cost was by slashing wages slashing the workforce and increasing productivity of the existing workers and then just making sure that working conditions he didn't spend a cent on improving working conditions
to make him safe. And that, that is really not, not because he amassed a fortune.
Some people criticize him for that, but it's tactics like that, like, like becoming a billionaire basically on the backs of people who he wouldn't have spent a cent to make sure could stay alive working in his factories.
That is the quintessential problem people have always had with Robert Barons, is that kind of mentality.
That's right. Now I'm done.
All right. We'll come back right after this and finish up with two more Robber Barons.
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Hello, everybody. We're back to talk about Andrew Carnegie.
You've ever been to Carnegie Hall or Carnegie Mellon University?
I've been to both. i've been to the university with you that's right we did a little job there one time that was fun i've been to carnegay hall i would i ushered a show there uh i didn't usher i passed out the playbills which meant i got to see the show for free and i saw what show oh man it was one
of those special nights i got to see beethoven's ninth with the full orchestra and german choir at Carnegie Hall.
It was amazing. Wow.
Something else. That's pretty neat.
And all I needed was a bow tie.
Is that the one that's, da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da?
No, maybe I named it wrong.
It's the, da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da -da.
Oh, the Die Hard song.
Yeah, the Die Hard song.
I gotcha. I went and saw Die Hard on concert.
It was great. It was hilarious.
So Carnegie, we're talking about Andrew Carnegie, who was born in Scotland, and they came to Pittsburgh.
He was very poor. He's about 13 years old, and he worked in a cotton factory.
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 will come into play later.
His favorite one was Flowers in the Attic.
Wow. I would have thought great expectations, but that's okay.
No, no. So 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 J .P.
Morgan at first. And then he turned his attention to steel.
Because again, remember, steel is basically the foundation for this American economy just blowing up.
And he was in Pittsburgh.
sure so he his name became synonymous with steel and i guess at first up until about 1892 he had a reputation as being a friend of the worker and that the the workers at carnegie steel and homestead just across the river from pittsburgh they they felt like you know carnegie would take care of them and they
found out the hard way that that was not the case when And they went on strike in 1892 during what came to be known as the Homestead Strike, which would result in the death of 10 people, which is not how they planned things to go.
And apparently the reason why that happened is because the Pinkertons were called in as strike breakers.
Yeah. 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 10 or 12 people that died were the Pinkertons.
No, no, I think it was just one.
I think the nine were the strikers, yeah.
Oh, okay. Well, we should definitely do a full episode then because I want to get this right.
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.
Um, but they arrived in barges and after the initial violence, the striking workers and some of their families surrounded these barges and demanded that the Pinkertons come off the boats.
Didn't they burn them?
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 the violence.
Yeah, 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.
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 laissez -faire as far as regulation is concerned, but they'll totally send in the National Guard not just to quell violence but to make sure that the strike breakers don't attack the scab labor to keep the factory going.
And that kind of like government capital collusion at the expense of the workers, there's a longstanding tradition of that being almost universally reviled in America.
Over enough of an arc of time, if that keeps up, more and more just everyday Americans start to notice and start to resent it.
And that apparently is a really good force for social change because Americans don't like that kind of thing after a long enough period of time.
Yeah, and I think Carnegie tried to distance himself from that strike by saying that he was sort of out of the loop.
He was in Scotland the whole time.
but they have since found correspondence that shows that he was very much involved in that.
And, you know, there's some speculation that he may have had some genuine moments of regret and guilt over that because he was a big time philanthropist later in life.
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 2 ,500 libraries.
And that's really one of his big legacies, 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.
They really have, for sure.
And he was one of just the all -time great philanthropists in American history, for sure.
um but he still pales in comparison to the the all -time top record holder philanthropist john d rockefeller who is also a robber baron but he also is far and away america's most prolific um and generous benefactor for sure he was also one of the most visionary philanthropists uh of all time too.
Yeah. And some people say that he was, uh, you know, if you just account for money and inflation, the richest man ever to live.
Um, I'm not sure how they calculate that because his $900 million, uh, peak in 1912 is about 23 billion today.
So here I saw how you ready.
I'm sure it's. Yeah, go ahead.
If you do his wealth relative to the total economic output, which is an even larger figure than gross domestic product.
I had a feeling it was something like that.
His wealth represented 2 % of the total economic output of the United States at the time.
To have that value today, you would have to be worth about $350 billion.
Okay. And I think Jeff Bezos is worth $140 or something like that.
Yeah. And I think we didn't even mention, was it Carnegie that had, At one point, like $1 of every $20 in circulation was his.
Yeah, that's right.
That was Carnegie for sure.
Yeah. I mean, these numbers are staggering for people like Rockefeller and Carnegie.
It's just, it's unbelievable.
But the thing is, and 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 at 900 million, like you said.
When he died, he had given away everything but 26 million of that.
And he probably felt kind of bad that he had 26 million dollars left because 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 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 an average worker.
Yeah. He would give away something like 10 % of all of his paychecks.
So he was a philanthropist his whole life for sure.
He was still a robber baron too, though.
Yeah, and his whole, you know, of course, oil was his business, Standard Oil.
It was just a Goliath, and there were a bunch of big, 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.
By the early 1900s, they controlled more than 90 percent of the oil market.
Can you imagine? 90 percent.
And the way that he cornered the market was, you know, he did that standard organization kind of thing where he went around and bought it first and then started to turn up the heat on the competition on the holdouts.
But one of the ways that he turned up that heat was he colluded with the railroad, the different railroads in the area who were shipping all this oil to say not only were they going to give him a rebate so he got money back where they wouldn't give money back to other oil shippers.
just because of, you know, volume.
That makes sense. But they also had to get his business.
And he had so much business that they would do this.
The railroads had to tax and added tax on all of his competitors.
So they paid an extra 20 to 30 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 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.
That's amazing. It is.
Let me see. He gave $75 million away to the University of Chicago.
Well, it kind of founded the University of Chicago with that money.
Also, Spellman, too, which was established to educate freed slaves.
He bankrolled Spellman for its founding as well.
And in one of our best and most favorite episodes, you might remember, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission helped eradicate hookworm in the South.
Yeah, totally. Remember that?
That is one of our better episodes for sure.
So those are just four of the sort of most famous and some might say notorious robber barons.
Big long list, you know.
You could throw Henry Ford in there.
John Jacob Astor, Charles Schwab, Andrew Mellon.
Jay Gould. Yeah, I was thinking about J.
Paul Getty, but he was later on.
He wouldn't have qualified.
So some of these guys had some terrible quotes 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, 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 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 if some of the ultra wealthy industrialists or innovators or people who basically the billionaires who are leading the world today are they just like robber
barons with better PR and better marketing and apparently supposedly that's not necessarily the case and here's why.
Remember I was saying that like robber barons were kind of being reformed by historians these days?
Yes. 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 that wealth and they did it on the backs of workers who 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 kind of became widespread to prepare people for the jobs that these guys created.
And you really 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 not only are they not great philanthropists necessarily, I'm looking at Steve Jobs, who isn'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 presiding over a decline, a decline in wages, a decline in living conditions, whereas these guys, these captains of industry and the robber barons from the 19th century, they were presiding over a rise, like an improvement in the way that America lived
and the standard of living.
Kind of the polar opposite, even though the inequality is roughly the same.
Very interesting. I think so, too.
I also wonder, though, too, if this inequality will usher in a second progressive era, which it seems like it has all of the markings to do that.
Maybe 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 listener mail, huh?
yeah i think i alluded to this in another one about the word marijuana yeah didn't i talk about that totally but i didn't read the mail right not that i remember no all right this is from jack glick hey guys love the show been listening for five years or so and i make sure not to miss any new episodes
i'm listening to the one on matcha when you started to talk about marijuana i decided to get in touch i am the lead analyst on cannabis taxation for the Canadian federal government, and we long ago made a decision to refer to the plant by its proper name, cannabis.
Marijuana has a number of historically racist associations, and I know you guys are always wary of using appropriate terms for things.
I had a good laugh at the question over whether womb was still okay to say in the ultrasound episode.
I thought you might like to know how outdated and implicitly offensive marijuana is, and I'd like to encourage you to use the word cannabis when referring to it in the future.
All the best, keep it up.
That is from Jack Glick.
That is a great name, Jack.
Great job, great name, great email from a great guy, I assume.
Sounds like a great guy.
If you want to show off what a great person you are, you can email us yourself like Jack Glick did.
Man, what a great name.
You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio .com.
stuff you should know is a production of iheart radio for more podcasts my heart radio visit the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows ready to celebrate the magic of live music south by southwest music festival returns to austin texas this march 10th through the 15th
with a fresh lineup of legendary and rising talent Join a global community of music lovers, artists, industry professionals, and creatives at the 2025 South by Southwest Music Festival.
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