The Robber Barons and the Industrial Age
Between the end of the Civil War and the First World War, the United States went from a farming republic that imported most of its manufactured goods to the largest industrial economy on earth. Steel output passed Britain's in the 1880s. Rail mileage quadrupled. Oil, which had been a curiosity in 1860, lit the country by 1880 and moved it by 1910. Almost none of this was planned by government. It was assembled by a small number of men who bought competitors, fixed prices, borrowed enormous sums, and organized whole industries under single ownership — and who were called captains of industry by their admirers and robber barons by everyone else.
Both labels survive because both describe something real. Andrew Carnegie gave away roughly ninety percent of a fortune built on twelve-hour shifts in hundred-degree mills. John D. Rockefeller cut the price of kerosene by more than half while destroying every refiner who would not sell to him. The same decades that produced Carnegie libraries produced Homestead, Haymarket, and Pullman. This guide follows the industrial age from the rails outward: the men and firms that consolidated it, the ideology that explained why the winners deserved to win, the strikes that contested it, the panics that periodically broke it, and the antitrust laws that finally gave the federal government a say.
Begin with the two forces behind everything in this guide: the industrial revolution that moved work from the workshop to the factory, and the Gilded Age that Mark Twain named for its thin gold surface. The barons, the strikes, and the laws that follow all grew out of them.
A handful of men controlled the railroads, steel, oil, and banking that built industrial America. Their methods ranged from brilliant to ruthless to outright corrupt, and the argument over whether they were builders or plunderers has never been settled.
The great fortunes rested on systems as much as on individuals: a government-subsidized railroad network that created a national market, a new oil field that broke a monopoly's grip on supply, and a moving assembly line that turned the pace of work into a management decision.
The barons needed a justification, and the era supplied one. Social Darwinism held that wealth and poverty reflected natural fitness, which made great fortunes look earned and reform look like interference with nature.
Workers organized against the new industrial order and often lost. The strikes in this section, from the railroad uprising of 1877 to the Pullman boycott of 1894, were met with Pinkertons, injunctions, and federal troops, and the labor movement that survived them learned to bargain for wages and hours rather than remake the economy.
The industrial economy grew fast and crashed hard. The panics of 1873 and 1893 each opened years of depression, threw hundreds of thousands out of work, and turned the economy's instability into a national political question.
By the late 1880s Congress, journalists, and eventually presidents began to push back. The first federal regulatory commission, the Sherman Antitrust Act, and Ida Tarbell's exposure of Standard Oil all set limits on the power the barons had accumulated, and the trust-busting presidents of the early 1900s used them.
The politics that grew out of these fights are traced in the Progressive Era guide, and the broader social world of the period — immigration, cities, corruption, and reform — in The Gilded Age.