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. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:49Josh Clark?

  Just describe what you want in your own words, no coding required. Base 44 handles the database, login, backend and hosting. Try it for free. Go to base44.com to get started. 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.

• 1:33Speaker 00

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:43Josh Clark?

  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. Held her breath for five straight minutes.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  It's a new record.

• 1:59Josh Clark?

  It really is.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  New studio record.

• 2:01Josh Clark?

  Sure. And this is Stuff You Should Know. That's no David Blaine record, by the way.

• 2:06Speaker 02

  No, I mean, that's her studio record. You should see her when she's pearl diving, though.

• 2:12Josh Clark?

  Wouldn't that be something if Jerry did have a secret life pearl diving?

• 2:17Speaker 02

  That would be amazing.

• 2:18Josh Clark?

  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.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah. And at first, from what I could tell, historians, like immediately after, in the few decades after the Gilded Age, which we'll talk about, where the age the robber barons worked and operated and lived in, really took it to be like 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 revive their image or actually make their image possibly better than it ever has been.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  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 it 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.

• 3:54Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I actually ran across, 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?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  I didn't, but I mean, of course, you can't make a perfect society. It makes sense.

• 4:31Josh Clark?

  Well, there, what, 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 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 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.

• 5:13Josh Clark?

  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.

• 5:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 5:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah, agreed. I don't know that it's, it's a great word either, but I think that that's, you know, I mean, hey, you're gonna argue with the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy? I'm not.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  Bring it on, man. I'll punch that thing right in the face.

• 5:43Josh Clark?

  Speaking of Stanford, did you know that Stanford University was named after a robber baron? Yeah, a robber baron named Leland Stanford, actually.

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of universities are named after robber barons.

• 5:55Josh Clark?

  Yeah, there's a lot of problems with some of the early histories of, of universities, as we'll find out in the coming weeks.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  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?

• 6:19Josh Clark?

  Gilded Lily, isn't that another one that, another thing people gild?

• 6:25Speaker 02

  I don't know. That's a pretty good band name, though.

• 6:27Josh Clark?

  Gilded Lily?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, like a 90s power pop.

• 6:30Josh Clark?

  Oh, totally. You nailed it. And I said, what about Breakfast at Tiffany's?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  But the gilded age is, and Dave Ruse helped us put this together, and he points out, it's not a term of endearment. When something is gilded, that means it's, it's got a thin coating of gold, but underneath it's, you know, it could be a gilded turd.

• 6:51Josh Clark?

  Sure. I hate that word so much.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  I love it. It's so great.

• 6:55Josh Clark?

  Do you? Oh, man, I hate it.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  I mean, I hate, I love it and how awful it is.

• 7:01Josh Clark?

  Oh, gotcha. But I think it's so awful, it like comes out on the other side as just plain old awful to me.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 7:09Josh Clark?

  So, um, yeah, that's the, that's the idea of the, the gilded age, that it looked great on the outside, but on the inside, it wasn't so great.

• 7:16Speaker 02

  But when was this?

• 7:18Josh Clark?

  So this was the, um, 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.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:27Josh Clark?

  And it was characterized by a huge, massive shift in the American economy, where I, I, 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, doubled in size in 15 years.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 7:50Josh Clark?

  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.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it was, um, because it happened so quickly and because it was such growth, I think the government was like, we're gonna stay out of this and kind of just let you, you dudes, do what you're gonna 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 gonna let that happen because we're also kind of getting rich on the side.

• 8:29Josh Clark?

  Right. So that kind of raises something that I saw, is that the idea that, 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.

• 8:46Josh Clark?

  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.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and what we're talking about 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 you could have people work harder for less and less wages. That kind of thing.

• 9:30Josh Clark?

  Right, exactly. And what's crazy, like, it was a dog-eat-dog economy.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:38Josh Clark?

  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

• 10:22Josh Clark?

  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...

• 10:40Josh Clark?

  The federal government is kind of lagging behind to catch up. It 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.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, let's, let's talk about the Gilded Age and the, I guess, just, you, you owe it all to trains, really, and trains you owe to steel. So you got to go back a little bit.

• 11:04Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:25Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  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. You could get that stuff anywhere you wanted to go and that changed everything.

• 11:52Josh Clark?

  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.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, the sitters.

• 12:17Josh Clark?

  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, 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.

• 13:00Josh Clark?

  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, the engine got put into gear and it just kind of took off like a rocket.

• 13:15Speaker 02

  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?

• 13:35Josh Clark?

  No, 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 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.

• 14:06Speaker 02

  I figured.

• 14:07Josh Clark?

  Who saw the problems with it. But the cool thing is, 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.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:29Josh Clark?

  That is not what they said in Cincinnati.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  Is that not a Cincinnati accent?

• 14:34Josh Clark?

  No.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  Okay, I might be thinking of Maine.

• 14:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah, right.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  But I wonder if, I wonder who was opposing it?

• 14:41Josh Clark?

  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, the, 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.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  I thought you were talking about the Rodney Dangerfield movie.

• 15:11Josh Clark?

  That was a easy money? Man, that is a tawdry movie.

• 15:16Speaker 02

  It was, wasn't it?

• 15:18Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was good, though.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:21Josh Clark?

  Hey, even the worst danger field movie is still pretty great.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 15:26Josh Clark?

  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 The Sherman Shirley lately.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Man, that is some comfort food, isn't it?

• 15:40Josh Clark?

  Dude, they are, but not only that, it's not like junk food, though. They're like well-written, well-acted,

• 15:46Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 15:46Josh Clark?

  well-directed TV shows. Like,

• 15:49Speaker 02

  It's Gary Marshall.

• 15:50Josh Clark?

  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.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:12Josh Clark?

  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.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:34Josh Clark?

  Yes. We're glad that the railroad exists so we can move these books around easily.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Oh, man. You ain't kidding.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  Ship these things to Cincinnati.

• 16:44Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  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 were going north because Reconstruction didn't work out so well.

• 17:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah, because it got abandoned.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Have we done one on Reconstruction?

• 17:09Josh Clark?

  No, no, we really need to, though.

• 17:10Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 17:11Josh Clark?

  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.

• 17:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 17:32Josh Clark?

  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.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  I believe it.

• 17:54Josh Clark?

  So, um, so you got...

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Should we take a break?

• 17:57Josh Clark?

  Oh, sure. I was just getting revved up. My own economic engine's idling high right now.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Well, take your foot off the gas.

• 18:04Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 18:24Speaker 02

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• 18:38Josh Clark?

  Well, with Base44, describe that in your own words. You don't need to know coding or programming. Then you just keep editing and refining it until it works exactly the way you want. Your build comes headache-free with built-in login, data storage, backend, and hosting. So what's the app you wish existed?

• 18:56Speaker 02

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• 19:04Speaker 03

  First thought is like, wow, how are we gonna do all this?

• 19:07Josh Clark?

  Hey, this is Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  That's Alan Goya, planning engineer at AT&T, and he's talking about Intuit Dome, home of the Los Angeles Clippers, where every seat, screen, phone, and transaction is connected with AT&T fiber and 5G, redefining the fan's experience. And Alan's master plan made it all possible.

• 19:26Speaker 03

  It was gonna rival anything that was already built. And that takes quite a bit of people and different teams to all be on the same page.

• 19:34Josh Clark?

  That includes field services manager Drexel Jones. His team made sure it all came together and held up on game day.

• 19:40Speaker 04

  Through with Alan's whole crew design, we connected the event visitors to the world.

• 19:45Speaker 02

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  What the fans experience is incredible. It gave me a lot of pride.

• 19:57Josh Clark?

  AT&T, connecting fans to what they love.

• 20:00Speaker 05

  Connecting changes everything. AT&T.

• 20:18Josh Clark?

  All right, we're back, Charles. I'm feeling much better now that my foot's off the gas. That was just good advice.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  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: 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?

• 20:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah, totally. It's exactly that kind of migration that you were talking about just a few minutes ago.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  And it didn't work out so well, right?

• 20:56Josh Clark?

  I don't know. 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 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 1873.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:25Josh Clark?

  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.

• 22:05Josh Clark?

  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.

• 22:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, here's some stats for you. In 1890, the top one, and this, these should all sound very familiar if you're alive and breathing oxygen today.

• 22:39Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  But in 1890, the top 1% of the US owned 51% of all wealth.

• 22:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Dude, more than half of all wealth.

• 22:50Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Isn't that nuts?

• 22:52Josh Clark?

  It is nuts, but you're right, it does sound very familiar.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  The top 12% owned 86% of all wealth.

• 22:59Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 23:00Speaker 02

  And the lower 44% of the US population, which was about half the population, owned 1.2%.

• 23:07Josh Clark?

  That's even more nuts.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:27Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  How about that?

• 23:30Josh Clark?

  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 sickens 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 Age, today, when people look at inequality, that kind of stuff, what they're, what, a lot of them, I'm sure there are people out there who are just jealous and haters for that reason.

• 24:15Josh Clark?

  But a lot of them say, no, no, like that that level, that that amount of disparity shouldn't exist, where if 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 and just basically did something

• 24:57Josh Clark?

  about it. They didn't take it laying down, which is actually criticism that's levied or has been levied in the past against people today.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I think there's also a notion that the more left-leaning people are anti-success. And that's that's not true either. It's, well, that's all I'm gonna say about that. That's just not true.

• 25:20Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  It's just not true. They're not

• 25:24Josh Clark?

  She said I rest.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  They're not anti-success. And 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.

• 25:41Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 25:42Speaker 02

  I think these are just broad-brush things that keep the country divided.

• 25:47Josh Clark?

  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.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  Agreed. So let's 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 US for the first time. It happened thousands of years ago in Europe.

• 26:15Josh Clark?

  I don't know about thousands of years, but

• 26:17Speaker 02

  A thousand.

• 26:18Josh Clark?

  Pretty close to, pretty close to eight, I'll, I'll give you that. 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, implying your goods along the Rhine.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. And you had, you couldn't just portage your steamship

• 26:53Josh Clark?

  No.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  up a mountain and over a mountain. You had to pay the piper.

• 26:57Josh Clark?

  Plus, they didn't exist at the time.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  What, steam ships?

• 27:01Josh Clark?

  Mm-hmm.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  When did those come around?

• 27:04Josh Clark?

  Uh, the early 19th century.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  You, you have a much better, just general world timeline that lives in your brain than I do.

• 27:13Josh Clark?

  Well, I understand history perfectly and without any, um,

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Err.

• 27:17Josh Clark?

  delusions or any of my opinions informing my vision of history as well.

• 27:23Speaker 02

  I think that's what you're known for.

• 27:25Josh Clark?

  Sure.

• 27:28Josh Clark?

  Wait, wait, were you joking?

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Oh, no.

• 27:31Josh Clark?

  Okay, good.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  I just, I always get the time periods confused, so I, I rely on books and research, like a big dum-dum. So

• 27:38Josh Clark?

  So do I.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know, but then you keep it in your brain. Mine just floats out like, like it, you ever see those cartoons with birds flying around people's head when they get knocked out?

• 27:48Josh Clark?

  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.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Those birds are always above my head. I don't have to get hit with an anvil or a piano.

• 28:02Speaker 02

  So, the Rhine Gorge was one of those really narrow straits. And, uh, 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.

• 28:20Josh Clark?

  It's crazy.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  Same as it is today.

• 28:22Josh Clark?

  It's almost like people are imperfect.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 28:37Josh Clark?

  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.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 28:50Josh Clark?

  And that became like a really great description for some of the, the, the most successful business tycoons of the 19th century. I think it first popped up in an Atlantic article in 1870.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:04Josh Clark?

  Where it didn't directly say that, it didn't say that these guys are the new robber barons, but it said that the, the old robber barons of the Rhine Valley were actually probably more honest than the new aristocracy of swindling millionaires.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Burn.

• 29:19Josh Clark?

  So it was, 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, the Gilded Age really starting to take off and people had already identified that there were some major issues developing.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  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, it's as old as time, you know?

• 29:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's so weird.

• 29:52Josh Clark?

  It is a little weird to, to, it's, it is weird. What's even weirder though is like, I, 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 and the line overall is kind of up, moves upward toward something great, I think, but.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Toward perfection?

• 30:17Josh Clark?

  Hmm? I wasn't maybe. I wasn't, uh, I wasn't alive 10,000 years ago, so who knows? Maybe that was the, the pinnacle of human existence. I don't know.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe. So should we?

• 30:27Josh Clark?

  Who can say?

• 30:27Speaker 02

  Should we talk about a few of these?

• 30:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so we, 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.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  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. I think they command like a fleet.

• 31:06Josh Clark?

  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.

• 31:23Speaker 02

  I thought there were no steamships.

• 31:24Josh Clark?

  There were by this time. And you know, 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?

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:37Josh Clark?

  He had a 30-year monopoly in New York to ferry people using steamships.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 31:45Josh Clark?

  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, 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.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 32:21Josh Clark?

  Yeah, so, so I think that's really kind of like instructive, though, man. Like, think about it. We 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, 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, in business. Which is fine. Like, maybe you'd say, this is too cutthroat for me. I'm just gonna sell out to these guys.

• 33:06Josh Clark?

  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.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  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, 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.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  He, and this is something that you'll see with a lot of these men, was a, a competition and a competitive edge and nature.

• 34:07Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  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 on some of these robber barons.

• 34:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  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."

• 34:30Speaker 02

  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.

• 34:41Josh Clark?

  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 happened 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 happened to be alive at the same time?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  I don't know, man.

• 35:12Josh Clark?

  I wonder.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  It's, it's interesting, though. It's, it's that competition. And again, with the plane view, not just a competition to succeed, but a competition to see that others don't.

• 35:22Josh Clark?

  Right. So, um, did you talk about the railroad yet? I didn't catch it.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:42Josh Clark?

  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 owned the railroad, you got a cut of every single industry.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 36:01Josh Clark?

  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, it was a good time to get rich off of the railroad, for sure.

• 36:14Speaker 02

  So, his first railroad ride was at 39 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 he was almost 40. And that train crashed, uh, 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."

• 36:39Josh Clark?

  That was so great.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  And he got into railroads. It's crazy, like a year later.

• 36:46Josh Clark?

  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.

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:58Josh Clark?

  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

• 37:40Josh Clark?

  time he was done cornering this stock, he had driven the shares up to $5,998.

• 37:50Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 37:51Josh Clark?

  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 of my railroad. You want to come buy mine and drive my stock price up?

• 38:06Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 38:06Josh Clark?

  And then buy me out? And so eventually, he didn't, he didn't even have to plunder other companies. They came to him and just said, here, buddy, buy us, please.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  They were Blue Star Airlines.

• 38:18Josh Clark?

  What is that?

• 38:19Speaker 02

  Remember that from Wall Street?

• 38:20Josh Clark?

  Was that from There Will Be Blood?

• 38:22Speaker 02

  There were no airlines in There Will Be Blood. No, remember Wall Street? That was the one that Martin Sheen worked for.

• 38:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  That Gecko came in and bought out and I think he shuttered them, though. That was the difference.

• 38:36Josh Clark?

  Yeah, yeah, he was a corporate raider. He, he, and actually that era, the 80s junk bond era is frequently cited, or it was at the time, as the Second Gilded Age.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:45Josh Clark?

  This is not the first time we're living in what's known as the Second Gilded Age.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:24Josh Clark?

  True.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  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?

• 39:33Josh Clark?

  Is that right?

• 39:34Speaker 02

  I guess back then, it's a lot of money.

• 39:36Josh Clark?

  Well, at the time, I mean, it's significant, sure, sure.

• 39:38Speaker 02

  Like, I feel like we could get Stuff You Should Know listeners to pitch in, and get a university named after us.

• 39:43Josh Clark?

  Let's try that, actually.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Like Stuff You Should Know You?

• 39:47Josh Clark?

  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 to his, mostly to his eldest son, William. In six years, William doubled that.

• 40:03Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 40:03Josh Clark?

  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.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:28Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  But I don't, I don't think, I mean, I know this one was demolished in 1926.

• 40:34Josh Clark?

  So, if you want to get a really good idea of just how rich these people were, go to Newport, Rhode Island.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 40:41Josh Clark?

  And visit Millionaires Row.

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Dude.

• 40:43Josh Clark?

  Because there was a huge, there's a huge, overlooking this cliff, there's a long row of the most astounding mansions you've ever seen, built during the Gilded Age.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  It's one of the better walks you can take in life.

• 40:55Josh Clark?

  It really is.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  You've got the ocean on one side and then these mansions on the other. It's really cool.

• 40:59Josh Clark?

  And each mansion, each mansion is so different from the others that 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?

• 41:16Speaker 02

  I agree.

• 41:16Josh Clark?

  It's really, it's really worth a visit. Plus Newport's just one of the more charming towns in the country.

• 41:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:28Josh Clark?

  Shake your fists at the dumb waiters and all that.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  But then you turn around and look at the ocean and think, oh, okay, all right.

• 41:34Josh Clark?

  It's really cool. It's a, it's a, definitely cool to visit them for sure.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 41:51Josh Clark?

  Is that right?

• 41:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:54Josh Clark?

  So I mentioned organization, and that's actually named after the next robber baron we're going to talk about, okay?

• 41:59Speaker 02

  Do we break beforehand and tease that?

• 42:01Josh Clark?

  No, I think we break after JP. How about that? Are you okay with that?

• 42:05Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 42:06Josh Clark?

  Okay. So, 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.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  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, partnered with a guy named Anthony Drexel, who was a banker and from Philly, and created Drexel Morgan and Company. And it became one of the biggest investment banks at the time in the world.

• 42:46Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and this was when he was in his early 30s, 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 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 you 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.

• 43:31Josh Clark?

  You go to a couple, you start buying them up. And then you put all those together and you 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.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:04Josh Clark?

  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 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.

• 44:32Speaker 02

  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 might hold. 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.

• 45:16Speaker 02

  But not at the expense of every other person trying to do well.

• 45:22Josh Clark?

  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 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.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  That's right. And if you listened to our monopoly game episode, you might remember that JP Morgan was the basis of Monopoly Man, Uncle Pennybags. Yeah, we talked about that.

• 46:09Josh Clark?

  Good, okay, that makes me feel good.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was modeled after old JP 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 Supreme Court said, yeah, it is, bust it up.

• 46:33Josh Clark?

  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 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, US Steel. Both of those were Morganized companies. And apparently, US Steel was the first $1 billion company that ever existed because of that that level of consolidation. But then, yeah, when the Sherman Antitrust Act was passed in 1890, that was a clear sign that that this was not going to stand much longer. And I think Roosevelt, it was Roosevelt, you said, right?

• 47:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, Teddy.

• 47:20Josh Clark?

  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, you know, 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.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  So that's JP. Now, do we take a break?

• 47:44Josh Clark?

  Oh, one more thing, Chuck.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:46Josh Clark?

  I'm not toying with you, I swear. So, 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 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 them safe. And that, that is really not why, not because he amassed a fortune, some people criticize

• 48:26Josh Clark?

  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 robber barons, is that kind of mentality.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 48:50Josh Clark?

  Now, I'm done.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  All right. We'll come back right after this and finish up with two more robber barons.

• 49:08Speaker 02

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• 49:22Josh Clark?

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• 49:50Speaker 02

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• 50:01Josh Clark?

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• 50:24Josh Clark?

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• 50:36Speaker 02

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• 51:04Speaker 02

  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.

• 51:15Josh Clark?

  Uh, I've been to the university with you.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  That's right. We did a little job there one time. That was fun. I've been to Carnegie Hall. I ushered a show there. No, I didn't usher. I passed out the playbills, which meant I got to see the show for free and I saw-

• 51:32Josh Clark?

  What show?

• 51:33Speaker 02

  Oh, man. It was one of those special nights. I got to see Beethoven's Night with the full orchestra and German choir at Carnegie Hall. It was amazing.

• 51:43Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Something else.

• 51:45Josh Clark?

  That's pretty neat.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  And all I needed was a bowtie.

• 51:49Josh Clark?

  Is that the one that's, um-

• 51:55Speaker 02

  No, maybe I named it wrong. It's the-

• 52:01Josh Clark?

  Oh, the Die Hard song?

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, the Die Hard song.

• 52:04Josh Clark?

  I got you.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  I went and saw Die Hard in concert. It was great.

• 52:09Josh Clark?

  That's hilarious.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  So Carnegie, uh, we're talking about Andrew Carnegie, who was born in Scotland and they came to Pittsburgh. He was very poor. He was about 13 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-

• 52:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Will come to play later.

• 52:37Josh Clark?

  His favorite one was Flowers in the Attic.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Wow. I would have thought Great Expectations, but that's okay.

• 52:43Josh Clark?

  Nope. So, he, um, 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, the foundation for this American economy just blowing up.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  And he was in Pittsburgh.

• 53:07Josh Clark?

  Sure. So he, 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 workers at Carnegie Steel in Homestead, just across the river from Pittsburgh, they felt like 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 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 Pinkerton's were called in as strikebreakers.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I might want to eventually do an episode on this, but that's sort of the overview. You bring in the Pinkerton's and then they battle with the, like, literally with guns. Pinkerton's died, I think, like, eight or nine of the 10 or 12 people that died were the Pinkerton's.

• 54:09Josh Clark?

  No, no, I think it was just one. I think the nine were the strikers, yeah.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. Well, we should definitely do a full episode then, because I want to get this right.

• 54:18Josh Clark?

  But what I read was that the strikers, so the Pinkerton's 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 Pinkerton's come off the boats.

• 54:43Speaker 02

  Didn't they burn them?

• 54:45Josh Clark?

  So the Pinkerton's said, "Okay, we'll come off if you guarantee our safety." And they said, "Fine." And the Pinkerton's 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 Pinkerton's escaped to the factory with their life and the National Guard was called in to quell the violence.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  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.

• 55:18Josh Clark?

  Right, starting with the Pinkerton's 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, that, that kind of like government capital collusion at the expense of the workers is, that is, there's a longstanding tradition of, of that being almost universally reviled

• 55:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:52Josh Clark?

  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.

• 56:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 56:37Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 57:06Josh Clark?

  They really have, for sure. And he was one of just the all time great philanthropists in American history, for sure.

• 57:15Josh Clark?

  But he still pales in comparison to 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 and generous benefactor, for sure. He was also one of the most visionary philanthropists of all time, too.

• 57:39Speaker 02

  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 $900 million peak in 1912 is about 23 billion today.

• 57:57Josh Clark?

  So here, I saw how. You ready?

• 57:59Speaker 02

  I'm sure it's, yeah, go ahead.

• 58:01Josh Clark?

  If you do his wealth relative to the total economic output, which is an even larger figure than gross domestic product.

• 58:09Speaker 02

  I had a feeling it was something like that.

• 58:10Josh Clark?

  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.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 58:24Josh Clark?

  And I think Jeff Bezos is worth 140 or something like that.

• 58:28Speaker 02

  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?

• 58:38Josh Clark?

  Yeah, that's right. That was Carnegie, for sure.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, these numbers are staggering.

• 58:44Josh Clark?

  For sure.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  For people like Rockefeller and Carnegie. It's unbelievable.

• 58:48Josh Clark?

  But the thing is, in 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- Very religious man and apparently he um learned very early on that it was every man's

• 59:31Josh Clark?

  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 a average worker.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:45Josh Clark?

  He would give away something like 10% of all of his paycheck. So he was a philanthropist his whole life for sure. He was still a robber baron too, though.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  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. By the early 1900s, they controlled more than 90% of the oil market.

• 1:00:20Josh Clark?

  Can you imagine?

• 1:00:21Speaker 02

  90%.

• 1:00:23Josh Clark?

  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 not only were they gonna 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. They, the railroads had to tax, an added tax, on all of his competitors.

• 1:01:04Josh Clark?

  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.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  That's amazing.

• 1:01:44Josh Clark?

  It is.

• 1:01:45Speaker 02

  Uh, 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.

• 1:01:55Josh Clark?

  Also Spellman, too, which was established to educate freed slaves.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:01Josh Clark?

  He, he, he bankrolled Spellman for its founding as well.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  And in one of our best and most favorite episodes, you might remember, the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission helped eradicate hookworm in the South.

• 1:02:13Josh Clark?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  Remember that?

• 1:02:16Josh Clark?

  Uh, that is one of our better episodes, for sure.

• 1:02:18Speaker 02

  So those are just four of the, uh, sort of most, uh, famous and some might say notorious robber barons. Big, long list, you know, you could throw Henry Ford in there, uh, John Jacob Astor, Charles Schwab, Andrew Mellon.

• 1:02:33Josh Clark?

  Jay Gould.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I looked at, uh, I was thinking about Jay Paul Getty, but he was later on. He, he wouldn't have qualified.

• 1:02:40Josh Clark?

  So some of these guys had some terrible quotes, too, that also just made them despised through history. Carnegie said that, uh, it's not the man who does the work who gets rich, it's the man who gets other men to do the work.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Josh Clark?

  Which is not a very tasteful thing to say, uh, 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, are they just like robber barons with better PR and better marketing?"

• 1:03:36Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 1:03:36Josh Clark?

  And apparently, supposedly that's not necessarily the case, and here's why.

• 1:03:42Josh Clark?

  Remember I was saying that like robber barons were kind of being reformed by historians these days?

• 1:03:47Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:03:48Josh Clark?

  Especially conservative historians? Well, they point to some like really indisputable things, like these guys were ruthless and they engaged in horrific, anti-competitive, uh, kind of anti-capitalist tactics to, to get those, the wealth, and they did it on the backs of workers who they took advantage of and didn't pay very well and, um, killed in their workplaces, basically. Um, but the reason that America is still powerful today is because of the work that these guys did, of the, the industries that they created. Um, public schooling came about and was, kind of became widespread to prepare people for the jobs that these guys created.

• 1:04:31Josh Clark?

  Um, 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. Um, the, 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. Um, that, 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. Um, 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 pres, they're presiding over a

• 1:05:16Josh Clark?

  decline, a decline in wages, 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, um, the, the, the way that America lived and the standard of living. It, the, kind of the polar opposite, even though the inequality is roughly the same.

• 1:05:38Speaker 02

  Very interesting.

• 1:05:39Josh Clark?

  I think so, too. I also wonder, though, too, if the, this, this inequality will usher in a second progressive era, which it seems like it has all of the markings to do that, too.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  Maybe so.

• 1:05:51Josh Clark?

  We need to do a progressive era episode, too, sometime, okay?

• 1:05:54Speaker 02

  Deal.

• 1:05:55Josh Clark?

  All right, well, since you said deal, Chuck, I think that's time for listener mail, huh?

• 1:06:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I alluded to this in another one about the word marijuana.

• 1:06:06Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 02

  Didn't I talk about that?

• 1:06:07Josh Clark?

  Totally.

• 1:06:08Speaker 02

  But I didn't read the mail, right?

• 1:06:10Josh Clark?

  Not that I remember, no.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  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 using, wary of using appropriate terms for things. I had a good laugh at the question over whether womb was still OK to say in the ultrasound episode. I thought you might like to know that, how outdated and implicitly offensive marijuana

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:07:03Josh Clark?

  That is a great name, Jack. Great job, great name, great email, from a great guy, I assume.

• 1:07:09Speaker 02

  Sounds like a great guy.

• 1:07:11Josh Clark?

  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 [email protected].

• 1:07:27Speaker 00

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 1:07:42Josh Clark?

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• 1:08:27Josh Clark?

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• 1:09:10Josh Clark?

  Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:09:13Speaker 06

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.