To get to the point, right at the start, Jay Gould was not a “Robber Baron”, nor was he the worst “Robber Baron,” as many journalists of his time as well as many historians in the next century liked to slander him, implying he was unethical, cruel, and routinely used under-handed tactics to destroy others while making himself wealthy. In fact, he was no more a robber baron then the entire class of hard-nosed businessmen who in the 1800s became America’s first generation of today’s billionaires, using the free enterprise system to gather wealth to themselves while building vast industries that employed millions and made the lives of everyone better and more prosperous.
I have just finished reading Maury Klein’s 1997 fine biography of Jay Gould, the Life and Legend of Jay Gould, and was not surprised to learn that Gould was never the evil personification of worst sort of capitalist, as routinely portrayed by our leftist academia for the past century. Instead, I discovered he was no different then all the other leading businessmen of his time, hard-nosed and ruthless when it came to cutting deals, but strongly committed to making the businesses he ran profitable and successful, providing the public a useful product they would be eager to use.
You see, in a free capitalist society, you can’t succeed unless you are willing to be ruthless at times. This doesn’t necessarily mean you routinely use violence, or break the law, or go out of your way to hurt others, but it does mean you defend yourself from attack, and retaliate quickly using legal means when under attack. These rules apply today as they did in Gould’s time. Nothing has changed.
Gould was no different than Cornelius Vanderbilt (whose life I reviewed here). Nor does he differ from John D. Rockefeller, or Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos, or any one of the thousands and thousands of American businessmen, who from the founding of this country used its free but legal framework to build a nation while enriching themselves.
Gould’s most famous area of success involved his ownership of many railroads, both in the American west as well as the first elevated subways in New York City. He also gained full control over Western Union, and for more than a decade ran a system that provided the entire country and even the world its first instantaneous method of communications. To gain control over these venues involved many battles, some of which required tactics that were harsh, even a bit under-handed, and clever. Sometimes it required payoffs to politicians, or tricky stock deals that once completed left many others sinking in the wake.
A typical anti-Gould newspaper cartoon from 1882
Gould’s tactics however were never much different than those of others of his ilk. And like those others, his overall good management of his companies he controlled, as well as the good treatment of the people who worked under him, garnered strong loyalty and support across these industries. Gould wanted control, but always when he had it he used it to make his product better and more useful.
When he died, it was the people who knew him who had good things to say about him, and it was the journalists who did not who continued to spread the slanders, because it made good copy and sold newspapers. And sadly, for the decades that followed, historians used those news reports — mostly wrong — as their primary sources of information, and thus the legend of an evil Gould was created.
Klein’s biography is a worthy effort to counter this bad history. More Americans should read it, if only to realize their past history was far more admirable than what they have been taught for the past few generations.
Gould’s tactics — and his success — were things he learned very earlier on in life, when he went out on his own.
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