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

The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed any citizen, including single women and freed slaves, to take possession of virtually any unoccupied 160-acre tract of public land, for a $12 registration and filing fee. Live on it for five years, build a house and farm the land, and it was yours for just an additional $6 “proving” fee. Over time, the Homestead Ac

Nineteenth-century political audiences were extremely well-informed—it was the age’s mass entertainment—and Lincoln’s listeners perfectly understood whom he was talking about. Slavery’s apologists often spoke of the need for a social “mudsill”—“a class to do the mean duties, to perform the drudgeries of life,” as a South Carolinian put it. Slavery

Once in office, and freed from Southern obstructionism after the attack on Fort Sumter, Lincoln and his Republican majority unleashed a blitz of prodevelopment legislation almost without parallel in American history—a “second American Revolution,” in the words of historians Charles and Mary Beard. The Republican achievement has been obscured by the

As a young man, we see him joining new settings, a church, perhaps, or an association of oilmen, and somehow, without apparent effort or almost without saying anything, he always emerges as the leader. Rockefeller was well built, though not as tall as his father, and a good athlete who enjoyed vigorous work—he loved to pitch in with the men at the

The mills drew from a swelling stream of farm girls and boys as New England agriculture withered under the onslaught of high-productivity New York farmers. Mill profits created an ample supply of venture capital, with activist investors prospecting for opportunities. The most talented young men perceived that a flair for machinery could be a fast t

The Valley’s venture investors were typically Boston merchant princes, men such as Israel Thorndike, S. A. Eliot, Samuel Cabot, Francis Stanton, and Harrison Gray Otis. Edmund Dwight, a Morgan cousin on his mother’s side, wasn’t in the same financial stratum as a Cabot, but gained access through his work at the law firm of Fisher Ames, the old Mass

The practical methodologies evolved over many years, and were largely the work of John Hall, a gunsmith from Portland, Maine, and inventor of the “Hall carbine” that became notorious when muckrakers dug into the youthful Pierpont Morgan’s dealings with Civil War procurement authorities.

The company’s competitive advantage, it appears, was mostly Carnegie—his relentless pressure, his hounding to reduce costs, his instinct to steal any deal to keep his plants full, his insistence on always plowing back earnings into ever-bigger plants, the latest equipment, the best technologies.

Carnegie jumped to his feet to claim the same share as Cambria, since the ET was the largest and most efficient plant in the industry. Otherwise, he announced, “I shall withdraw from [the pool] and undersell you all in the market—and make good money doing it.” Carnegie had bought shares in all the other companies—all but the ET were publicly traded