The robber barons were not a group of evil super villains. OR WERE THEY? Learn all about these titans of industry from the Gilded Age in this classic episode.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What are the characteristics of the Gilded Age?
But not only that, it's not like junk food, though. They're like well-written, well-acted, well-directed TV shows. It's Gary Marshall. It's not at all like throwaway or disposable. It doesn't rely on like special effects or anything like that. It's just good stuff, man.
Yeah, I agree. And you know what? Since we're on this tangent, we should tell everyone that we're writing a book and it's coming out this fall. Yeah. It's called Stuff You Should Know, an incomplete compendium of mostly interesting things. And you can preorder it now if you want a special custom poster. Dude.
Yeah, you pre-order it and you can go and upload your receipt at stuffyoushouldreadbooks.com. And then there's like a little thing that says like get your pre-order gift and you upload a picture of your receipt and they mail it to you. And you will be very happy with it because it's pretty awesome.
Yeah, and we want to sell – we do want to sell these books out there. We want to sell these books all over the world.
Yes. We're glad that the railroad exists so we can move these books around easily.
Oh, man. You ain't kidding. Ship these things to Cincinnati. Yeah. So where were we? So we were shipping things. Regional businesses were becoming national businesses. People were leaving the farms. They were leaving small towns. They were going to the big city. Immigrants were pouring in from Europe. African-Americans were going north because Reconstruction didn't work out so well.
Yeah, because it got abandoned. Yeah.
Have we done one on Reconstruction? No, no, we really need to, though. Totally. I mean, the more I've been reading a lot about that period in history, and yes, we need to definitely do one on that.
But the point is, there are a lot of people flocking to work this, what was called the second industrial revolution, where we saw over a period of about 40 years, factory output went from $1.9 billion to $13 billion. Wow. Right.
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Chapter 2: How did the robber barons influence American society?
Chuck, I've seen every cartoon that ever existed, and I remember each of them perfectly and without any of my opinions coloring my view of them.
Those birds are always above my head. I don't have to get hit with an anvil or a piano. So the Rhine Gorge was one of those really narrow straits. And in 1250, Emperor Frederick III died. There was no successor, and basically that meant no regulation. And believe it or not, even way back then, a lack of regulation meant that people would take advantage of that. It's crazy. Same as it is today.
It's almost like people are imperfect. Almost. And so these thieves would move into that gorge, jam up those tolls, maybe just steal stuff if they wanted to as well, and they were named the robber barons. That's where that term came from, those people.
Yeah, because they actually were like low-level nobility, and they already were well-off, but that didn't prevent them from – You know, trying to take advantage of the merchant class who were just trying to make their way and make a living.
That's right.
And that became like a really great description for some of the most successful business tycoons of the 19th century. I think it first popped up in an Atlantic article in 1870. Yeah. Where it didn't directly say that – it didn't say that these guys are the new robber barons, but –
It said that the old robber barons of the Rhine Valley were actually probably more honest than the new aristocracy of swindling millionaires. Burn. So it's a big, big-time burn. So even in 1870, people were saying, like, this is wrong. There's something, like, really wrong here.
I mean, this is within just a few years of the Gilded Age really starting to take off, and people had already identified that there were some major issues developing.
Yeah, it's so weird to look at this stuff. and just how apt it applies to what's going on today. And we think, I think some people think that these are all new problems and new issues, but it's as old as time, you know?
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