History According to Bob - The Robber Barons

Overview Robber Barons:

"There'll also be a discussion on corruption, because literally what we consider today illegal in the business world was standard operating procedures. It was still illegal to bribe public officials and do things like that but y'know, stock tips. All sorts of other things. Those, there weren't laws on the books to deal with them"


Arrival of Astor Stewart and Vanderbilt:

"You could also take a ship to Panama, and the Panamanian railroad, which was the most expensive railroad on earth, for gold will take you from one side of Panama to the other where you can get a ship to go up to California. If you couldn't afford the price to ride in the train they charged you gold to walk the track to the other side. So a lot of American entrepreneurs decided that, because Panama at that time was controlled by Columbia, the best way to go was to go through Nicaragua...

He was also extremely cheap. He had a wife and 9 children and they lived almost as paupers. He still used the first carpet from his first house even though it was threadbare. And he was brutally indifferent to his children. Called his oldest son an idiot and consigned him to a farm on Staten Island until he was middle age and that's when Dad dies and he finally gets to inherit some money. Another son Cornelius was disowned for spending too much money. His wife was committed to the Bloomingdale Asylum. At his advanced age he was still insatiably chasing young women and has an interesting career at that.

Vanderbilt sums up his fierce competitiveness in a note to associates who tried to take advantage of a trip that he took to Europe. He wrote on this short note: 'Gentlemen. You have undertaken to cheat me. I will not sue you, for the law takes too long. I will ruin you. Sincerely, Cornelius Vanderbilt'"


Rise of John Rockefeller:

"He had a tendency to rarely support his family and periodically was a fugitive from the law. 'I cheat my boys every chance I get. I wanna make 'em sharp. I trade with the boys and skin 'em and I just beat 'em every time I can. I want to make them sharp'...

He went to bed. The first thing he did he would read the BIble. The second thing he did was he would... talk to his pillow about his business adventures"


Jay Cooke and the American Civil War:

"Cooke's doctrine: 'A national debt is a national blessing'"


Huntington and Steamships:

"On one occasion, the hardware merchants calculated it would be cheaper to have a cargo of nails to be shipped from New York to Antwerp, reloaded on a British ship that went around Cape Horn, landing in Redondo California than to use the direct mail connections of the octopus"


Robber Baron Diversions:

"It was popular to hold poverty socials. One of these put on by a Western railroad millionaire cost $14,000 for 30 people and all the guests came dressed in rags to pretend they were poor. Food was served in scraps on wooden plates, the diners sat on broken soap boxes, buckets and coal carriers. Napkins were made out of newspapers, desk cloths and old skirts and beer was served in rusty tin cans...

Well, then we get to some other diversions. Became popular for the grand tour of Europe. Now this is usually the women and daughters of the wealthy who then traveled to Europe seeing all of the things, buying antiques and bringing them home. And of course, we have the daughters.

So they're interested in marrying titled foreigners. According to some of the records from 1909 500 American women married titled foreigners, and those foreigners were worth 220 million dollars. So they would get a title, they would get all this fancy stuff… and of course they are buying European antiquities and bringing them home to decorate their homes on Madison Avenue and so forth and so on. And then we have painting collecting. This really began in 1870 amongst the wealthy with William Vanderbilt, and he spent about $1.5 million in his lifetime and he bought all kinds of paintings. He particularly enjoyed nudes, but he bought all kinds of paintings.

This led to a competition with Gould, Stillman, Havemeyer and Morgan and JP Morgan will outdo them all. In one case on viewing a small Vermeer painting, Morgan asked two questions. The first one was who is Vermeer. Dutch painter, you know, so forth and so on. And the second one was how much. The price was $100,000. He said, I'll take it"


Labor and Homstead:

"In England, if you look at the laws of protecting property. When you realize that in England in the 1700s, that if you stole something worth more than five pounds, it was a death sentence, because property in the Georgian era was more important than people. Well, this is kind of coming to roost here in the United States"