It would be an odd history of Britain, or France, or Spain, etc., which ignored the role of the aristocracy throughout the early modern period and on through the 19th century.
But exactly that oddness is a keynote of the grand narrative
of American history. Muckrakers, like Ferdinand Lundberg, the muckraking author
of various books about the superrich, or Mathew Josephson, who wrote a memorable
book about the Robber Barons, are definitely on the outskirts of American
historiography. That historiography even lacks an anthropological account of American
capital, something that would conceptualize the admixture of clan wealth and
the corporate legal structure to get at the experience of power in the United
States.
Myself, I take the term bratva, the Russian argot applying
to criminal gangs as associations of “brothers”, as a good overall term that
applies to American plutocracy.
Lately, of course, we have our mouths and eyes full of
plutocracy. From Joe Biden giving a (choke) medal of freedom to the founder of
the Carlyle Group (so much for the regulation of private equity on the Dem side
of the equation) to the obvy influence of Musk, a billionaire, on our
billionaire prez, Trump, they are here to tell us: we’ve always been here.
Yet though this headless heedless nuclear armed country is
led by the most incestuous products of the boardroom and bedroom, I see few
calls to go back to the muckraker classics. In the Neolib era, we are supposed
to forget those embarrassing vulgarians, gawping at the felonious hijinks of
those who made their piles in the 19th and 20th centuries.
A pity. On the list of books about America that are taught
in cultural studies classrooms, I imagine few have a place for the Superrich or
The Robber Barons.
Lundberg did have some rightwing populist leanings – but Josephson
was my angelic ideal, combining an acute literary sensibility (one of the twenties
exiles in Paris, a litterateur who wrote a memoir entitled Life among the
Surrealists) with a solid career at Fortune, back when Agee worked there and
you could visit Whittacker Chambers in his office at the other Luce publication,
Time Magazine, by taking the elevator.
Chambers, of course, was in a Manichean struggle with
Communism. Josephson, though, had his eyes on the prize. The Vanderbilts. The Rockefellers.
The Morgans.
The Robber Barons came out at the right time, when a
combination of Republican populists from the West and Democratic New Dealers
from the East were making robber barons quite uncomfortable with their
questions and committees – for instance, the Nye committee and its questions
about J.P. Morgan’s profiteering in WWI. In the Eisenhauer era and up to the
present, the conservative counter-attack on the “robber baron” myth is very,
very concerned that we see these “entrepreneurs” in a sober light as, well,
geniuses and our heroes. Every bratva has its minstrel.
Josephson quotes the Beards, those permanently unfashionable
populist historians, in the introduction to his book:
“These men were robber barons as were their medieval
counterparts, the dominating figures of an aggressive economic age.
In any case, "to draw the American scene as it unfolded
between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century, without these
dominant figures looming in the foreground, is to make a shadow picture,"
as the Beards have written. "To put in the presidents and the leading
senators . . . and leave out such prime actors in the drama is to show scant
respect for the substance of life. Why, moreover, should anyone be interested
in the beginnings of the House of a Howard or Burleigh and indifferent to the
rise of a House of Morgan or Rockefeller?"
That these are “houses” or clans is a claim that, alas, has
not taken root in a historiography that, no matter how Marxist or lefty the
ideology of the historian, still takes no hint from the copious documentation
of the anthropology of clan power in other societies. Those, of course, are “primitive”
societies – not like our techno-powered secular scientific one of today and
tomorrow! An essay by business historian Richard R. John, Robber Baron Redux,
traces the phrase back to Charles and Henry Adams classic account of Jay Gould’s
manipulation of railroad stock, Chapters of Eerie, another book on the
outskirts of our American classics. John also attributes the disrepute of the “robber
baron” thematic in business history to Alfred Chandler, whose influence on
business history is much greater than that of Marx – at least in the U.S.
Chandler preferred Industrial Statesman – not so feverish and ideological. About
the same time, the term entrepreneur was revived by Joseph Schumpeter, and
after a bit of a hiatus there – those crazy sixties and seventies – got take into
the bosom of official speak in the Reaganite eighties. By now, of course, it is
official – with the nineties cult of Jack Welch and the present cult of Elon
Musk being the most celebrated images in the gallery – the rich are treated not
as robbers but as artists. The
entrepreneurial myth – that value comes from the top, from management, rather
than from the bottom, from workers – has been firmly set in place, liquidating
the American rebellion that informed the counter-culture of unions, surrealists
and Fortune journalists during the long period of American questioning.
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