In the twentieth century and the twenty-first they became entrepreneurs, necessary business revolutionaries, ruthlessly changing existing practices and demonstrating the protean nature of American capitalism. Their corporations were the Octopus, devouring all in its path. Robber Barons, standing for a Gilded Age of corruption, monopoly, and rampant individualism. At first, White says, they were depicted as: Historian Richard White argues that the builders of the transcontinental railroads have attracted a great deal of attention but the interpretations are contradictory: at first very hostile and then very favorable. Hostile cartoonists might dress the offenders in royal garb to underscore the offense against democracy. The term combines the pejorative senses of criminal ("robber") and aristocrat ("barons" having no legitimate role in a republic). Geisst says, "in a Darwinist age, Vanderbilt developed a reputation as a plunderer who took no prisoners." Hal Bridges said that the term represented the idea that "business leaders in the United States from about 1865 to 1900 were, on the whole, a set of avaricious rascals who habitually cheated and robbed investors and consumers, corrupted government, fought ruthlessly among themselves, and in general carried on predatory activities comparable to those of the robber barons of medieval Europe." To organize and exploit the resources of a nation upon a gigantic scale, to regiment its farmers and workers into harmonious corps of producers, and to do this only in the name of an uncontrolled appetite for private profit-here surely is the great inherent contradiction whence so much disaster, outrage and misery has flowed. But all this revolutionizing effort is branded with the motive of private gain on the part of the new captains of industry. Under their hands the renovation of our economic life proceeded relentlessly : large-scale production replaced the scattered, decentralized mode of production industrial enterprises became more concentrated, more “efficient” technically, and essentially “coöperative,” where they had been purely individualistic and lamentably wasteful. Even their quarrels, intrigues and misadventures (too often treated as merely diverting or picturesque) are part of the mechanism of our history. "more or less knowingly played the leading rôles in an age of industrial revolution. In the book's original foreword, he claims the robber barons: In his 1934 book The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists 1861-1901, Matthew Josephson argued that the industrialists who were called robber barons have a complicated legacy in the history of American economic and social life. A critic of this tactic drew a political comic depicting Vanderbilt as a feudal robber baron extracting a toll. The state-funded shippers then began paying Vanderbilt money to not ship on their route. Vanderbilt's private shipping company began running the same routes, charging a fraction of the price, making a large profit without taxpayer subsidy. Political cronies had been granted special shipping routes by the state, but told legislators their costs were so high that they needed to charge high prices and still receive extra money from the taxpayers as funding. The first such usage was against Vanderbilt, for taking money from high-priced, government-subsidized shippers, in order to not compete on their routes. In their greed and power, legend has it, they held sway over a helpless democracy." Stiles says the metaphor "conjures up visions of titanic monopolists who crushed competitors, rigged markets, and corrupted government. The metaphor appeared as early as February 9, 1859, when The New York Times used it to characterize the business practices of Cornelius Vanderbilt. The term robber baron derives from the Raubritter ( robber knights), the medieval German lords who charged nominally illegal tolls (unauthorized by the Holy Roman Emperor) on the primitive roads crossing their lands or larger tolls along the Rhine river. 4 List of businessmen labelled as robber barons.
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