I’ve been watching “The Men Who Built America” these past couple weeks. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. Sure, you may know the names Vanderbilt, Rockefeller and Carnegie from your history lessons, but this show really brings them to life in new and interesting ways.
For example, I never knew they were all so tightly interwoven, and each one was bent on screwing the other as best they could to rise to the top of the heap. Rockefeller brought Vanderbilt to his knees by making his railroads irrelevant to the shipping of kerosene. This had a spillover effect in ruining another railroad magnate which caused Carnegie to dedicate his life to exacting revenge on Rockefeller. You want intrigue? Forget any two bit detective novel out there right now. Real life, or should I say historical real life, is so much more fascinating.
The show isn’t all documentary. Actors play the roles. I think that’s what makes it so interesting. Well, that and the fact that a parade of entrepreneurs and business magnates from today add their own two cents to the stories.
As you may recall, this was back when Wall Street was the Wild West of business. Anything and everything was legal. At one time Rockefeller owned 95% of the oil in this country as well as its production capacity. Vanderbilt once put the squeeze on his competitors by shutting down the only bridge that led into New York. He could do that because he owned the bridge.
What I find interesting is the parallels between today and back then. No, this isn’t a political diatribe on the candidates running for office. But it is about the haves and have nots, because if we think it’s this case today, watch the past for a great lesson on not only how it was worse back then, but how the past could come back and bite us on the ass.
This was a rough and tumble era. Workers were a necessary evil in the lives of these men, something to be used and then thrown away. This gave way to labor riots, the calling out of private police squads, shootings and retribution. It was a tremendous tumult in an age when America was shifting from being largely agricultural to industrial. Yes, the Industrial Revolution.
So, here’s where I found it getting so interesting and why it’s relevant to today. These were very powerful men. Money wasn’t the reason they made decisions; that was just a way for them to keep score, like playing tennis or billiards with another magnate. Monopolies weren’t illegal. It also wasn’t illegal to print as much stock as you wanted in an effort to put your competitor out of business. This was the age of small federal government and a very powerful Wall Street.
Sound familiar? There’s a large number of very wealthy people who want us to return to this economic model. They want business to be able to do what it wants to in the name of driving the economy.
But does it really? That’s the interesting lessons you can glean from history. In the case of the Industrial Revolution, it indeed did lift a lot of people out of poverty and into the middle class. This was made possible by an increasing demand for workers, a shortage of abled-bodied workers and finally, the advent of unions who ensured safe working conditions in the factories and mills springing up everywhere, the businesses created by the omnipotent businessmen who would squash their peers like a bug in a moment’s notice if they could figure out a way.
I note this because during the first episode, I heard Donald Trump slip up a bit. He was one of the pundits talking about these amazing business people who really did build America on their ideas, innovation and often, shear willpower. There’s the Don, pontificating as usual about how this all came about.
And he offered up a little gem that I think slipped by a lot of people. He said, and I paraphrase a bit, that the power brokers love it when the economy is in the dumper because you can’t get any good deals when the economy is humming right along. As a businessman, you actually want things to be bad so you can buy up other companies and make massive, obscene profits.
If you think about the reluctance of Congress (re: the wealthy, regardless of side) to pass any bills that would take us out of the historic recession we’ve been in, then you can understand their motivation – they are all making a killing buying businesses, stocks and assets for pennies on the dollar. They don’t care about the workers put out of work or the families who now can’t keep their mortgages up to date, because they simple can’t pass up such a good deal out there.
This was evident in the show. At one point, Rockefeller was caught between a rock and a hard place. Vanderbilt had outmaneuvered him. The only way for him to ship oil out of Pennsylvania was to use the railroads. So what did Rockefeller do? He simply shut the refinery down, putting hundreds of workers out of business. He did this just to piss off Vanderbilt and show who was really the top dog these days. Check and checkmate.
This is the chess game these guys play with us every day. The Don let it slip in the show. He admitted that he loves a crummy economy because he gets richer and richer from it. He doesn’t want good times; it’s too costly.
So the next time you hear one of these guys pander to all the other 99% remember what Donald Trump said. Don’t fall for the old line that they want a vibrant economy where everyone gets an equal chance. They are playing you, they are playing all of us. Like their predecessors, the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, they want us to stay beholden to them, they want all the power in this country. And you and I don’t fit into their master plans.
In the Emerald City, all the wiser for watching just one TV show where a giant ego spilled his guts,
– Robb