Have you seen any ads for the History Channel’s new miniseries, The Men Who Built America? I chin-stroke a bit at Jacobin online over what a sudden burst of Gilded Age nostalgia might say about living in America today. Give it a read — I promise I won’t report you to HUAC if you do.
Elias Isquith
Elias Isquith is a freelance journalist and blogger. He considers Bob Dylan and Walter Sobchak to be the two great Jewish thinkers of our time; he thinks Kafka was half-right when he said there was hope, "but not for us"; and he can be reached through the twitter via @eliasisquith or via email. The opinions he expresses on the blog and throughout the interwebs are exclusively his own.
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Damn fine essay, Elias.Report
I mostly agree with you on this – seriously, I watched a chunk of two of these shows the other night (it was late, nothing else on, etc.); the Rockefeller episode in particular reminded me of nothing so much as my least-favorite Ayn Rand passages. But I will say that the Carnegie episode does have a scene that portrays a massacre of protesting workers as exactly that: a massacre.Report
Is there where I sound like a luddite and scream “GO READ A BOOK!” and perhaps point people to something like Titan?Report
In my defense, i just had it on because it was on after Pawn Stars, and I just never changed the channel while I was catching up on my reading of the League.Report
I forgot to add that the only reason I had Pawn Stars on was as revenge for The Wife’s viewing of one the Shows That Shall Not Be Named on Bravo.Report
I would stop talking at this point, Mark. You’re digging yourself a bit too deeply now.Report
Yeah, I was a bit confused as to how that was supposed to be a defense.Report
“But officer, I was only holding his head under water so he’d stop screaming about how much the stab wounds were bleeding.”Report
My only complaint is this:
“Dial it back around 100 years, to the time when every president had a big bushy beard…”
There were remarkably few presidents with beards and of those, the last one was Benjamin Harrison who left office in 1901. Supposedly Harry Truman rocked a goatee while on vacation but I can’t find a picture.Report
Chester Arthur had the mustache-that-connects-to-mutton-chops which should have disqualified him from office all by itself.Report
Nope. I am one of those annoying people who has not watched the history channel for a long time because it is not real history.
There best stuff was from the mid to late 90s and they have largely been downhill since trying to be more like reality TV/pop sociology with a little history thrown in.
Too much military history as well. I think of the channel as being for people who think they are history buffs but not really interested in going beyond the surface on many things.
/Mini-history nerd rantReport
But I did enjoy your article.Report
I haven’t watched it, but go ahead and spoil it for me anyways.
Grey aliens were behind the Johnstown Flood, right?Report
They didn’t build that.Report
Bravo.Report
And in the first Golden Age, a banker bailed out the Federal Government. In all subsequent ones, it was the other way around.Report
I saw the Rockefeller episode too, and though I assume there was a lot of BS (natch) in there, ultimately I found the story pretty inspiring. It seems to me that from a public perspective, all that was missing was sufficient taxation on the mature industry’s profits and worker safeguards. There’s nothing to regard as bad in the actual creation of the hyperprofitable industry he developed. t let a lot of people have access to cheap energy where they had to live in the dark before.Report
…Of course, the episode really didn’t follow the story very far into JDR’s business practices as the financial titan far removed from the actual building of Standard Oil.Report
…Your point about workers not getting credit is a good one, though in the story of the industry’s development, probably it’s always going to be just assumed away, given that low-skill labor was going to be readily available for any employer in those days (and these). The guy I thought got short shrift, both in this retelling, and probably in the actual events in terms of the actual compensation he got for his innovation, was the guy who came up with kerosene in the context of the program. (I have no idea if that had any relation to the actual development of kerosene in actual petro-industrial history.)Report
Because there was nothing special about the people who did the actual labor. The US and Europe didn’t modernize because the rank-and-file workers underwent a spontaneous increase in awesomeness. Modernization happened because engineers invented new technologies and entrepreneurs built companies to employ those technologies productively.Report
There wasn’t really anything special about the entreprenuers either.
For example, we often hear about heroic entrprenuers who “built” a mining business out on the frontier.
But of course the role that the taxpayers and military had in evicting the previous landholders such as the Sioux or Apache is overlooked; the role of the government in maintaining order and enforcing contracts and supplying a steady stream of workers is overlooked.
So really, the only skill they possess is the ability to wine, dine, fellate and flatter various politicians into transferring money from the public treasury into their pocket.Report
Sometimes, when I hear Mike McClure sing the lyrics “Behind every great fortune is an even greater crime” I think of you.Report
And the engineers got their reward by getting squeezed out and dying young and broke.Report
Just like Tesla and Walter White!Report
Actually if you look at major Gold and Silver discoveries the discovers all got nothing in the end from the discovery. Marshall and Sutter got nothing from 1849 in Ca, the Groshs died before the Comstock got really going, and Henry Comstock died broke in 1870. The same happened to the guy who founded Cripple Creek. In many respects it was the bankers and the store keepers who made the money in the Gold rushes, which were the prototypical get rich quick scheme.Report
Exactly- Those who made the fortunes were those who sought and received the protection of government.
But the first Gilded Age had one advantage over this Gilded Age; back then it was possible for a plutocrat to fail and be wiped out.
Has any Wall Street CEO in living memory been forced to accept the consequences of bad decisions and wiped out by bad investments?Report
I watched the Rockefeller episode and it ignored the South Improvement Company and the collusion with the railroads in favor of making it a conflict. Further it did not mention that independents first built the Tidewater pipeline which was built to break the Standard Oil monopoly, making it appear that pipelines were the idea uniquely of Standard Oil. In general taking the book Titan as a guideline the show was less than faithful to the book. On Vanderbilt it also ignored the whole Erie (Daniel Drew,Jim Fisk, Jay Gould) episode. It also ignored the Pa railroad as a competitor to the NYC almost from the day both reached Chicago. So all in all to make conflict they did the usual and whitewashed and then repainted the parts they wanted of history.Report
TLDR; But I’m guessing the thrust of this article was “You [they] didn’t build that”.Report