The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson

Author:Matthew Josephson
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2017-05-30T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Certain Industrialists Arose

THE very outcries of the underlying population during the late 1870’s and the 1880’s, of workers who found their wages being reduced, of farmers in much greater number who found the value of crops deflated, while freight tariffs and other services or goods they must obtain remained relatively high—all this testified to the strategic power held by the railroads over their regions and over broad sections of the nation’s commerce.

Both by example and by the facilities they offered (of opening a nation-wide market) the combined trunk-line systems suggested plainly to the industrialists in other fields that they organize themselves in similar fashion. But in addition to broader markets and swifter, cheaper circulation of goods in larger cars, drawn by heavier locomotives, the secret tactics of the rebate gave certain producing groups (as in petroleum, beef, steel) those advantages which permitted them to outstrip competitors and soon to conduct their business upon as large a scale as the railways themselves.

The method of combination once established, it communicated itself with remarkable speed throughout the industrial system. In rapid succession, joint-stock companies of much larger capital than ever used before began to exploit natural resources, such as copper and soft coal, or new industries such as steel, barbed wire, bicycles, telephones, electric power. These big units of enterprise seemed to, spring up to full size almost overnight. The period of large-scale production, of rings, syndicates and pools, was at hand; the golden age of small industries was virtually ended. Although the number of business enterprises continued to increase slowly, an overwhelming share of the production was carried on in the few “miltion-dollar plants” in each field. This new scale and new technique brought the great increase in American manufactures, always pointed to by historians, by which in the ten years after 1880 manufactures rose in value from five billion dollars to more than nine billions, making the United States in very short order the premier industrial nation of the world. But more, the very process of enrichment (by the industrialist) was made comparatively quick, a fact which was remarked by many observers. In a public address in Chicago, in 1883, a United States Senator exclaimed:

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