Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
Documenti di Cultura
RAPACIOUS? SURE. BUT 19TH CENTURY TITANS CARNEGIE, ROCKEFELLER AND MORGAN SET THE STAGE FOR THE
EMPIRE BUILDERS OF THE 20TH
By RON CHERNOW
Staring out from their photographs, they are the archetypal tycoons: one a
steely-eyed Scot with a spade-shaped white beard; another a craggy, Ichabod
Crane look-alike; the third a fat cat in striped pants with a watch chain strung
across an ample paunch.
Today they have the look of fossilized reactionaries, but these turn-of-the-
century titans were men who lived in booming, anarchic times and thrived on
them. The Gilded Age was a turbulent period of unfettered capitalism and
unfathomable wealth for them and their peers--an environment free of
income tax, meddling regulators and other curbs on the animal spirits of
freewheeling entrepreneurs. Yet these febrile decades, forever decried as the
era of the robber barons, forged the tremendous engine of economic growth
that propelled the country from rural isolationism in the 19th century to world
industrial leadership in the 20th.
A prolific writer and autodidact who authored eight books and 70 magazine
articles, Carnegie was a voluble, if sometimes naive, adherent of the Victorian
faith in mankind's progress. His quixotic ideals often clashed, however, with
the brute realities of his steel mills, where men toiled 12-hour days, seven
days a week. If Carnegie fancied himself the friend of the workingman, he
had to face the ultimate comeuppance in 1892 when his associate Henry Clay
Frick brutally suppressed striking workers in Homestead, Pa., in the bloodiest
clash in U.S. labor history.
After selling his empire to J.P. Morgan in 1901 to form the centerpiece of the
new behemoth, U.S. Steel, Carnegie devoted himself to good deeds. A
prodigious philanthropist, he created 2,800 free libraries worldwide. "The man
who dies rich dies disgraced," he declared bluntly. Like Rockefeller, Carnegie
endowed large corporate foundations with elastic charters that took on an
autonomous existence. At his death he had disbursed almost his entire $350
million fortune.
If Rockefeller and Carnegie built the industrial age, then Morgan (1837-1913)
financed it. The most imposing personage ever to bestride Wall Street--his
nickname was Jupiter--Morgan had a thunderclap voice, a ferocious glare and
a grotesquely disfigured red nose that, he once ruefully joked, had become
"part of the American business structure." Where Rockefeller and Carnegie
endured hardscrabble boyhoods, Morgan came from a well-to-do Hartford,
Conn., family, and his appetite for bosomy women, enormous yachts (his 300-
ft. Corsair lent him a piratical image) and exquisite art was legendary.
Morgan issued stocks and bonds for railroads (think of them as you would
software companies today), brokered deals among them and dominated their
boards. He recapitalized so many bankrupt railroads--Morganized them, as
wits said--that by the 1890s he controlled one-sixth of America's railway
system.
Like Rockefeller, Morgan scorned competition as wasteful and ran afoul of
federal trustbusters who broke up his railroad holding company, Northern
Securities, in the early 1900s. The apex of Morgan's power came in 1901 with
the creation of U.S. Steel, the first billion-dollar corporation. This was followed
by International Harvester, the farm-equipment trust, and the International
Mercantile Marine, the North Atlantic shipping cartel. In fact, Morgan presided
over so many large-scale industrial consolidations that he recast the banker's
role from that of handmaiden to master of industry.
Between 1836 and 1914, the U.S. lacked a central bank; Morgan stepped
boldly, sometimes magnificently, into that breach. When gold reserves
backing the country's legal tender dipped perilously low in 1895, he
masterminded a bond issue in New York and London that replenished the
gold stock--one of many acts he performed that preserved America's credit
abroad and evinced a new financial maturity that won the confidence of
foreign investors.
During the 1907 Panic on Wall Street, an aging Morgan mobilized the city's
bankers in his solemnly ornate library and got them to commit money to a
rescue fund that ended the bank runs convulsing the city. It was the last
hurrah for a self-regulated financial system: Morgan's dazzling improvisation
proved the urgent need for a central bank, setting the stage for the passage
of the Federal Reserve Act in 1913.
Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan were not the only robber barons, of course.
Edward H. Harriman fought Morgan for control of the railroads. Andrew and
Richard Mellon founded four major companies, including Alcoa. But the scale
on which Rockefeller, Carnegie and Morgan operated was unprecedented,
paving the way for a world of global companies and capital flows. And their
money built a platform for philanthropy that has grown every bit as much as
their corporations.
Ron Chernow is the author of Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller Sr. He has
also written a biography of J.P. Morgan