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The Pros And Cons Of Robber Barons

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After the Civil War, Americans converged to build a nation with optimism. This saw a new wave of industrialism steered by a few entrepreneurs who set up firms to amass wealth and create employment to Americans. The success of these industrialists led historians and other scholars to refer to them as captains of industry or robber barons. By referring to them as captains of industry, historians implied that they applied their ingenuity and inventiveness to transform the economy, and impact the lives of the people through philanthropy. They were also castigated for exploiting the American workers through poor working conditions and low wages for their own selfish gain. However, these men struggled to lay a blueprint for future entrepreneurs, transformed the economy, and made America what it is today.
A robber baron is a business leader who uses his workers’ effort to amass personal wealth with little compensation and contributing negatively to the nation. Robber barons also fail to perform their patriotic duty of paying taxes. They are in most case unscrupulous and despotic. …show more content…

P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Ford could be termed as robber baron from the means in which they run their businesses. These men had high levels of government influence to help protect their vast empires, paid low wages to workers to keep profits high, and had a great control over the nation’s resources and business infrastructure (Perry and Smith, 308). These industrialists built empires by crushing competitors and acquiring their businesses to create monopolies and raise the prices for their own gain. They used unscrupulous schemes to trade stocks at exorbitant prices to other investors, destroying the worth of such companies, and eventually making them go bust so that they could be left in

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