Most strikingly in the public eye were the great Titans of the new business era, the coal and meat “barons” and the copper, railway, steel, and other “kings,” men of the type of the elder J.P. Morgan, of James J. Hill, William H. Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Frick, William H. Clark, and Rockefeller. Such men had certain broad traits in common, differ as they might from each other as individuals. They were men of wide economic but intensely narrow social vision, and of colossal driving power and iron wills. They could lay their economic plans with imperial vision in time and space, but for the effect of their acts on society they cared nothing whatever. They claimed the right to rule the economic destinies of the people in any way that would enure their own personal advantage. Illogically, they insisted upon the theory of laissez-faire for all except themselves, while they demanded and received every favor they wished in the way of special privileges from the government, as in the tariff and the silver purchase Act. The whole machinery of government must be at their disposal when desired — legislation, court decisions, and Federal troops. They combined their business units into “trusts” and combinations of almost unlimited power, yet they insisted on “freedom of contract” when dealing with labor, whose organization in any form they almost wholly refused to sanction. truthstreammedia/history-lesson-america-is-the-same-ol-oligarchy-it-was-over-a-century-ago/
Posted on: Thu, 01 Jan 2015 21:21:22 +0000
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