The Tycoons: How Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, and J. P. Morgan Invented the American Supereconomy

The creation of the Dow Jones Industrial Index in 1895 and John Moody’s Industrial Manual in 1900 were signposts of their growing importance.

The muckraker Ida Tarbell once dismissed Rockefeller as a man with the “soul of a bookkeeper,” an image that has stuck to him ever since. It was true that he loved the completeness and concreteness of good ledgers, and insisted that every entry, every tally, every invoice had to be right; but the “bookkeeper” label does not begin to capture the rea

We will ship any Windsor Organ or Piano on trial to any railroad shipping point in the United States, subject to the following conditions: Upon receipt of order we will ship the instrument to our own address, send a sight draft with bill of lading attached to your banker’s. When the shipment arrives at destination, the purchaser will be required to

Being middle class was suddenly a life strategy, not just an economic category, and one that was mostly managed by women. Tactics included smaller families, greater concentration on child-rearing and child education, careful budgetary management to maintain the required status signals without extravagance, and inculcating children with habits of pr

mainstream department stores aimed at the “middle-class” homemaker. They amazed and flattered her with the elegance of the environs and with the deference of the salesclerks, but canny retailers understood that their homemaker wasn’t wealthy, and had instincts of thrift and austerity stamped in her genes. They could pull her in with spectacle, addr

Bid rigging produced extraordinary margins: in the late 1890s the companies collected $345–420 per ton of armor (a compromise after the Russia–Bethlehem embarrassment) against production costs of perhaps $150. With that kind of money at stake, what patriot could pass up the chance to defraud his fellow citizens?

With no way to cover their shorts, firms up and down Wall Street faced bankruptcy, as did the banks who had been financing their positions; Harriman had no choice but to back off the fight, so Morgan and Schiff could unwind their positions and forestall a crash.

All of these businesses operated below the radar screen of megacapitalists like the Morgans. Their primary capital expenses were for real estate and inventory, which could be financed by traditional mortgages and bank working capital lines. But that was true only because they could “externalize” the cost of all the shipping infrastructure that Morg

Farmers were generally not heavily mortgaged—only about a third of all farmers had mortgages at all, in part because the Homestead Act and railroad land grants made land so cheap.