Michael Hiltzik is the author of the new book Iron Empires: Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America. His other books include The New Deal and Colossus. A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, he works for the Los Angeles Times.
Q: Why did you decide to
write about the robber barons who were involved in the railroad industry in the
Gilded Age?
A: The idea for the book
evolved over a period of about a year, after the completion of my previous
book, Big Science, a biography of the physicist Ernest Lawrence within the
context of nuclear physics from the 1930s through World War II.
I’ve always been interested
in 19th century American history and the history of technology, so my first
thought was to write about the building of the transcontinental railroad, which
was completed in 1869. But that story was told recently enough that it didn’t
warrant a new treatment just now.
So I began thinking about
starting in 1869, and telling the story of the development of the railroads—and
America—from that point on. That would enable me to deal with the railroads as
technological achievements and features of the economic landscape.
In turn, that meant telling
the story of the original Gilded Age, and my editor and I both agreed that the
best way to tell that story was through the lives and work of the first
generation of railroad tycoons.
Q: The book focuses on
several titans, including Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, J.P. Morgan, and
E.H. Harriman. What role did they play in late 19th century American life,
and do you see any people today playing similar roles?
A: These tycoons were the
first business celebrities in American history.
I quote James Bryce, a
Scottish diplomat who wrote sort of a sequel to Tocqueville’s Democracy in
America in 1888, writing, “The railway kings are among the greatest men,
perhaps I may say are the greatest men, in America….They have fame, for
everyone has heard of their achievements; every newspaper chronicles their
movements. They have power, more power—that is, more opportunity of making
their personal will prevail—than perhaps anyone in political life.”
Bryce was right, though he
did not foresee that public admiration of these business leaders would rise and
fall with how Americans thought of the railroads—which would by no means be universally
positive.
The railroads were at first
seen as expressions of America’s technological and economic might, but soon
enough the realization emerged that they were economic actors in their own
right, and not primarily concerned with anything but their own profits.
That was especially true
during business slumps, when they laid off workers by the thousands—leading to
the creation of America’s first nationwide labor union and fomenting its first
major national strike. In short, public regard for them vacillated between
great respect and admiration, and profound suspicion, even hatred.
Every era has its own
business leaders that attract admiration and disdain, often in equal measure.
The closest to the robber
barons we have today are Silicon Valley and high tech tycoons such as
Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Tesla’s Elon Musk, and bit earlier Microsoft’s
Bill Gates and Apple’s Steve Jobs.
They show the same bad habits
of their predecessors in believing that the welfare of themselves and their
corporations is synonymous with the public interest, and the same inclination
to impose costs on the public in the course of building profits for themselves.
They resemble their
predecessors, too, in sometimes being treated as sages in all things even
though their successes are in fact narrow. Like the robber barons of the
earlier age, some deserve public esteem, some don’t.
Q: How did you research the
book, and did you learn anything that particularly surprised you?
A: I researched the book by
mining archives and libraries in New York, California, St. Paul, and elsewhere,
as well as contemporary memoirs, newspapers, and financial records and journals.
For the cultural aspects of
the story, there’s The Gilded Age, the 1873 satire by Mark Twain and Charles
Dudley Warner that gave the period its name; I also quote extensively from the
poetry and prose of Walt Whitman, which reflect the waxing and waning of
American esteem for the railroads and their owners.
Writing history is a
succession of surprises, especially at the remove of more than a century.
I was surprised to learn of
the rapidity of the rise of Edward H. Harriman, whose railroad career spanned
barely a decade but whose rapid absorption of detail and aggressive dealmaking
made him the most important magnate in the industry before the turn of the
century.
I was also surprised by the
fact that many of the most important leaders in the railroad industry in the
first decades after 1869 cared little for maintaining and improving their
roads; their interest was in trading railroad securities—that’s where the
profits were.
Q: What do you think are some
of the most common perceptions and misperceptions about these robber barons and
the impact they had?
A: The public thinks of the
“robber barons” as a uniformly rapacious, self-interested crowd.
Some were seen this way at
the time, especially Vanderbilt and Jay Gould, but the general impression was
probably formed more by the Pujo Committee, a Congressional investigation that
laid bare the manipulations of the barons in 1912-1913, and whose conclusions
became the gist of Other People’s Money, an influential book that made the
name of a Boston lawyer named Louis Brandeis and eventually propelled him to
the Supreme Court.
The truth was that the robber
barons made an important contribution to America’s economic development—at
least, some of them did. Vanderbilt and Harriman brought the railroads into the
modern world of corporate management.
J.P. Morgan rationalized the
industry by ending competitive behavior such as the construction of unnecessary
lines devised strictly to goad competitors into buying them out. Morgan
understood that railroads were in a general sense natural monopolies, though
his attempts to monopolize the industry for himself went too far.
Q: What are you working on
now?
A: Still contemplating my
next project.
Q: Anything else we should
know?
A: Studying and writing about
this period was not only fascinating in its own right, but instructive about
our own time. After all, the Gilded Age of the 19th century was only the first.
We’ve been living through the second—another period of ostentatious getting and
spending of extreme wealth—in our own time.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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