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Wait.... It has been a while since I studied this era, but my understanding is that Rockefeller, Frick, JP Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Mellon et al. were the
by true_religion 13y ago
Wait....
It has been a while since I studied this era, but my understanding is that Rockefeller, Frick, JP Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Mellon et al. were the "good guys" like in the instance of Carnegie steel which gave back tremendously to the community.
The named figures of this period, who still have visible fortunes today, were generally better than the grand morass that were known as the robber barons.
- pron 13y agoSome of them were great philanthropists who generously donated to causes of their choosing some of the fortune they had amassed by exploiting and disenfranchising vast populations. Those I named were chief among the robber barons, and some of their descendants, perhaps most notably the Rockefellers, tried to distance themselves from or atone for the means by which their forefathers had come by their wealth. This cartoon[1] shows "infant" Roosevelt battling the Rockefeller and JP Morgan "serpents". No, they weren't the good guys by any means, despite their philanthropic deeds. They most certainly industrialized the US, but so did Stalin in the USSR (though most would agree that the American robber barons were better than Stalin :)). [1]: http://newsjournalist.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/the-infant-hercules-political-cartoon.jpg http://newsjournalist.files.wordpress.com/2010/01/the-infant...
- dragontamer 13y agoA little bit of both. No one can deny the fact that Carnegie created the Steel Emmpire, etc. etc. that provided a baseline for American Manufacturing through the middle of the 1900s. Furthermore, many of these "Barons" became philanthropists and gave away huge portions of their fortune. However, they also had no morals with regards to child labor, unions, worker rights, and so forth.