The Robber Barons Revisited

This book explores the connection between the so-called robber barons who led American big businesses during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and the immigrants who composed many of their workforces. As the book argues, attribution of industrial-era class conflict to an “alien” presence supplements nativism—a sociocultural negativity toward foreign-born residents—as a reason for Americans' dislike and distrust of immigrants. And in the era of American industrialization, employers both relied on immigrants to meet their growing labor needs and blamed them for the frequently violent workplace contentions of the time. The book uncovers the connection of immigrants to radical “isms” that gave rise to widespread notions of alien subversives whose presence threatened America's domestic tranquility and the well-being of its residents. Employers, rather than looking at their own practices for causes of workplace conflict, wontedly attributed strikes and other unrest to aliens who either spread pernicious “foreign” doctrines or fell victim to their siren messages. These characterizations transcended nationality or ethnic group, applying at different times to all foreign-born workers. The book concludes that, ironically, stigmatizing immigrants as subversives contributed to the passage of the Quota Acts, which effectively stemmed the flow of wanted foreign workers. Post-war employers argued for preserving America's traditional open door, but the negativity that they had assigned to foreign workers contributed to its closing.

Download Full-text

ROBBER BARONS

A Mighty Fine Road ◽

10.2307/j.ctv1574p8z.7 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 87-134

Keyword(s):

Robber Barons

Download Full-text

The Robber Barons (1870–90)

Wall Street ◽

10.1093/0195130863.003.0004 ◽

1999 ◽

pp. 64-98

Author(s):

Charles R. Geisst

Keyword(s):

Robber Barons

Download Full-text

Bankers and Robber Barons

Dirty Money ◽

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198783220.003.0004 ◽

2017 ◽

pp. 55-78

Author(s):

Vincenzo Ruggiero

Keyword(s):

Robber Barons

Download Full-text

David R. Farber, Everybody Ought to Be Rich: The Life and Times of John J. Raskob, Capitalist; and Susie Pak, Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan

The Business History Review ◽

10.1017/s0007680513001475 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 88 (1) ◽

pp. 187-194

Author(s):

Noam Maggor

Keyword(s):

Progressive Era ◽

Business Leaders ◽

Market Manipulation ◽

Industrial System ◽

Abuse Of Power ◽

American Capitalism ◽

The World ◽

Analytical Perspective ◽

Modern Business ◽

Robber Barons

When business historians discarded the melodramatic mode of analysis more than a half century ago, transcending a stale debate over whether business leaders were “heroes” or “villains,” they also shifted emphatically away from finance as a topic of inquiry. A generation of muckraking accounts, culminating in Matthew Josephson's The Robber Barons, had dramatized American industrialization as a story of stock market manipulation and abuse of power. These narratives featured financiers, not as full participants in the formation of the new industrial system, but as an external and almost entirely disruptive force. They attached a stigma to finance that prompted scholars, inspired by the work of Alfred Chandler, to turn elsewhere for insights about the rise of modern business. More recently, a new cohort of historians—Stephen Mihm, Julia Ott, Jonathan Levy, Louis Hyman, and Richard White, to name a few of the more prominent names—has rediscovered finance as an analytical perspective and subject of immense significance. With a more subtle and nuanced approach than their Progressive-era forebears, they have moved bankers, investors, and stockbrokers from the margins and positioned them at the very core of American capitalism.

Download Full-text