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

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

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.

His power was real, grounded in his unique role in channeling the ballooning trove of American savings. One way or another, through control of boards, investment partnerships, or just implicit understandings that a bank’s or an insurance company’s investment committee would follow Morgan’s lead, he and his partners disposed of perhaps 40 percent of

The clear impression is that prosecutors had trawled through years of tariff filings searching for possible Standard violations, however technical. In short, it looks like harassment—an impression that is reinforced by the government’s request on retrial, after the case was thrown out on appeal, to present a separate evidential argument for each of

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?

The extraordinary productivity at Carnegie plants put them in a different class from their competition. During a rail price war in 1897 Carnegie Steel pushed the other companies to the wall by driving rail prices from a previous low of $28 a ton to only $18, and at one point to an almost unimaginable $14. The chief executive of Illinois Steel, its

Trustbusters thought they were slaying a dangerous monster when the Standard was broken up in 1911; instead, they were doing the shareholders, and especially John Rockefeller, a large favor. Once the stock of the individual companies were listed in their own names, and they could compete freely, their market values multiplied many times over, and R

The antimonopoly fervency in America traces back to Andrew Jackson and earlier. Hofstadter locates it in a culture of “farmers and small-town entrepreneurs—ambitious, mobile, speculative, antiauthoritarian, egalitarian, and competitive.”

As the British had discovered to their grief in steel, it is almost impossible to maintain a technology edge amid declining production, and the huge new refineries and pipelines in Texas and California were inevitably a generation ahead of the Standard’s.