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The capitalists behind the Big Bang of America's economy.
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Author: Collins, Clayton
Section: books
history
| The capitalists behind the Big Bang of America's economy |
Strikes. Land grabs. Genius. Greed. It was quite a show
The Tycoons:
How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould,
and J.P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy
BY CHARLES R. MORRIS
Henry Holt
382 pp., $28
Picture a grand exposition in London, 1851. The sun-never-sets era is well under way, imperial imperiousness in full bloom.
The biggest concern
among the hosts, amid their 12,000 fountains and their exhibition halls
of iron-and-glass: that "foreign rogues" will pocket Britain's trade
secrets. Special scorn is reserved for the colonials who will surely
show up.
The Americans come, but it's not industrial espionage that they have in mind.
On the same day that
the schooner America trounces the British cutter Aurora in a race
around the Isle of Wight (the first America's Cup), an American at the
show picks the "unpickable" British Bramah lock - then cheekily puts up
$1,000 for any British locksmith who can crack his own machine-made
locks.
It is just one
sideshow in a stunning display of might from across the pond. Cyrus
McCormick has just torn up the local competition with his reaper.
Samuel Colt has shot it to pieces with his repeating-firearm exhibit.
Decades earlier - for
reasons including abundant resources and few barriers to business - the
stage had already been set for a period of explosive growth in American
invention and enterprise that would surge after the Civil War, when the
Connecticut River Valley became the Silicon Valley of its day.
With The Tycoons,
Charles R. Morris presents a portrait of a critical time for a nascent
economic superpower though the dazzling - sometimes dubious -
interactions of a key young foursome of players named Carnegie,
Rockefeller, Gould, and Morgan.
The book is neither a
straight-up celebration of their hardball capitalist skills nor a
scoldingly instructive laying bare of the uncaring opportunism that too
much power can bring out.
Instead, it manages to be a little of both.
Morris displays a
cultural diarist's careful attention to detail that makes a reader feel
like a time traveler plopped down among men who were by turns vicious
and visionary.
Some passages are a
little too close to caricature. "[Jay] Gould was barely five feet tall,
even smaller than Carnegie, but with none of Carnegie's voluble
energy," Morris writes in a typical characterization. "Instead, he made
a wan, silent, somewhat hunched figure. During times of crisis he would
usually sit calmly and quietly, betraying tension by tearing small bits
of paper."
Another gold-hungry investor is described as having "nostrils quivering with the scent of money."
But Morris's stark
depictions of me-first, monopolistic behavior aren't hard to believe
for anyone who follows modern-day corporate news. As the stakes rose,
the behavior of many in this class of young tycoons took on a
bare-knuckles dimension whenever their worlds - gold, railroads, oil,
livestock, banking - overlapped.
Egos flared. There
were takeovers and alliances, strikes and land grabs, some played out
in the public eye and others in backroom skirmishes.
Drama ran high. J.P.
Morgan gave Andrew Carnegie a deadline for the completion of the great
St. Louis Bridge that Carnegie's crews beat by only hours, averting
bankruptcy.
Strike-breaking steel
magnate Henry Frick, shot and stabbed by anarchist Alexander Berkman,
wrestled down his attacker, held him for guards - and then stuck around
the office doing paperwork and writing a press release indicating that
his firm's labor policies would remain unchanged.
Such individual fanaticism aside, there were collective national triumphs.
By 1876, more than
halfway through what Morris calls "a most peculiar decade" because of
its huge but stutter-step growth, an exposition in Philadelphia would
showcase something called the Corliss engine.
With it, America was
symbolized by a monumental machine that one writer at the time, Morris
recounts, called "an athlete of steel and iron with not a superfluous
ounce of metal on it; the mighty walking beams plunge their pistons
downward, the enormous flywheel revolves with a hoarded power that
makes all tremble…."
An etching of the
Corliss, Ulysses S. Grant standing beside it, is among the book's most
interesting illustrations (others include a photo of a 70-horse plowing
team on a North Dakota farm and one of a 2,000-passenger Ferris wheel
in Chicago in 1893).
Morris also tracks
the roots of more ominous outgrowths of fast economic and population
growth, such as the rise of factory farms and exploitative management
structures.
And he chronicles the
gung-ho societal aspirations triggered by the speed of business. For
example: Ivory Soap, an accidental product, becomes an early megabrand
for a culture that would ultimately become largely defined by
consumerism.
Morris's scope is
ambitious. Some sections demand close reading for their complexity. But
"Tycoons" covers ground that is essential to understanding the
foundation of a national economy.
It shows how business
hardball can veer into self-aggrandizement. It peers back with clarity
at nothing less than the Big Bang of the American boom.
PHOTO (COLOR)
~~~~~~~~ By Clayton Collins
Clay Collins is on the Monitor staff.
Some items on this website are used by permission granted
in the Fair Use guidelines of the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act.
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