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

But since they originally chased oil freight to use excess capacity, oil revenues needed only to exceed variable costs to be attractive. A careful review by the industry historian Harold Williamson suggests that the oil traffic was almost always profitable, which canny businessmen like Gould and Vanderbilt would have understood intuitively. The fac

New York farmers and grain merchants were the big losers, but the chances of Congress requiring the roads to raise rates from the west were approximately zero.* What farmers did care about, on the other hand, was rate volatility, since the perennial price wars frequently caused a violent seesawing of tariffs. The Eastern Traffic Association, the la

The data are consistent and unambiguous: the 1870s was a decade of very strong growth.

But if production was rising, the question remains of why prices were falling. The simplest explanation is that it was a consequence of America’s return to the gold standard in 1879. After Jay Gould’s 1872 Gold Corner, the greenback had settled into a trading range of 125 to 130 greenbacks for $100 in gold. Achieving parity with gold and the Britis

A typical ploy was to open his books to the target: any sensible man would understand that competition was hopeless and make a deal. If a target was especially obdurate, rejecting all reasonable offers, a switch would finally turn and Rockefeller would suddenly unleash total, blazing warfare on every front—price, supplies, access to transportation,

In that respect, the American consumer boom represented the final flowering of the Connecticut Valley machine tradition of Thomas Blanchard, John Hall, and the great superintendents at the Springfield Armory. The woman who breaks the bobbin on her sewing machine while running up curtains at home and the soldier in the field with a broken gunlock pr

Carnegie’s drive to the top of the steel industry feels almost hormonal—boundless energy, aggression, and ambition fortunately channeled into something constructive. Rockefeller’s seems much more a matter of sheer intelligence in pursuit of an ever-larger scale of elegance and order. Carnegie pushed and badgered, shamelessly playing executives agai

Dodd’s trust structure became the standard technique for large combinations through the 1880s, until it was made unnecessary by the New Jersey Holding Company Act of 1890, which specifically enabled multilayered, multistate corporate structures. By that time, the term “trust” had become shorthand for almost any large business combination, regardles

None of the Morgans, or Loebs, or Belmonts, or Barings, who shoveled billions of dollars into American railroads, and telegraphs, and steel mills, and iron and coal mines, thought about selling wrapped and scented ladies’ soap. But that, it emerged, was what all that infrastructure was for. P&G used tree resin instead of animal tallow for the f