ROBBER BARONS

This disapproving term was used to describe late-nineteenth-century industrialists, especially those who ostentatiously displayed their wealth. The phrase gained widespread popularity as the title of a history published in 1934 by Matthew Josephson in the depths of the Great Depression. It was applied to industrial leaders and corporations of the late nineteenth century, such as Andrew Carnegie and Carnegie Steel, John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, and Cornelius and William Vanderbilt and their railroads. Emphasizing efficiency, these men used increasingly modern practices like large-scale, specialized production in place of decentralized methods. They also practiced "vertical integration," controlling not only the manufacturing and sale of the final product but also the raw resources. Thus, Carnegie Steel was involved in coal and iron, and Standard Oil owned wells and refineries, and controlled railroads that transported the oil to market. The term robber barons also has been applied to financiers such as Jay Gould and J. Pierpont Morgan, who set up large trusts and provided loans for these industrialists.

Their defenders have described Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, and their peers as "industrial statesmen" because they enhanced and modernized the American capitalist system by making the nation more productive and thus stronger economically and internationally. But the term robber barons suggests a different view that puts more emphasis on their indifference to the public welfare and their display of wealth at the expense of their workers: huge mansions, for example, in contrast to the company towns or urban squalor in which their employees lived. Such comments as William Vanderbilt's "The public be damned!" expressed the scornful attitude that earned the robber barons their unsavory reputation.

See also Carnegie, Andrew; Gould, Jay; Morgan, J. Pierpont; Rockefeller, John D.; Vanderbilt, Cornelius.