Robber Barons: How a Medieval Insult Came to Define the Gilded Age

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In 1975 Stanford students voted to name their sports teams the Robber Barons. The administration vetoed the choice as disrespectful to founder Leland Stanford, a railroad magnate and one of the very men the phrase was made famous to describe. The term itself is far older. It comes from the German Raubritter, feudal lords who built castles above the Rhine and charged illegal tolls on passing merchants, taking wealth at a choke point without creating any.

This episode follows the phrase from the Rhine to American politics. It first landed on Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1859, then spread to Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, Jay Gould, and John D. Rockefeller. Historians have fought over it ever since. Matthew Josephson's 1934 book cast the tycoons as a threat to democracy, while Allan Nevins answered in 1940 that men like Rockefeller brought order to industrial chaos. The same argument now surrounds Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg.

• On February 9, 1859, the New York Times applied the idea to Vanderbilt after subsidized shipping rivals paid him to keep his cheaper steamships off their routes.
• The word baron stung in a republic founded on rejecting aristocracy, and cartoonists drew businessmen in crowns and royal robes.
• Historian John Tipple described a devil view of history, in which people battered by depressions blamed visible villains instead of hard to grasp economic forces.
• Railroads run by men like Leland Stanford were drawn as an octopus, its tentacles wrapped around state houses, farms, and small businesses.
• Burton W. Folsom Jr. separates political entrepreneurs, who live on subsidies and government favor, from market entrepreneurs who win by cutting costs. By that test Vanderbilt belongs in the second group.