Judy Smith Quotes

Robber Barons

The robber barons were a blessing to America. They got filthy rich but they took enormous risks and were entitled to get rich.

In the 1880s, people all over the world looked to America for inspiration. Its very existence was proof that it was possible to have a relatively free and peaceful country. No income tax, no foreign wars, no welfare state, no intrusions on civil liberties.

When it comes to rapacious 19th century capitalism, my family's hands are clean.

I was taught by professors who had done their schooling in the 1930s. Most of them were scornful of, even hated, big business.

Out of this modern civilization, economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital - all undreamed of by the Fathers - the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

The industrial revolution was accomplished by a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.

In the time of the robber barons, my great grandfather insisted on reinvesting and sharing profits with workers... He was told he was a socialist, that he was not welcome on Wall Street.

I don't mean to be presumptuous, but I liken myself to the robber barons.

Trump's administration looks a great deal like those of the 1850s and the 1890s, with business and government so intertwined that they cannot be disentangled.

I can live with the robber barons, but how do you live with these pathological radicals?

It's very much related to the American tycoon. To William Randolph Hearst, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, that whole stratum of American acquisitive evil. Monopolistic, acquisitive evil. Ugly evil. The ugly American. The ugly American at his ugly worst. That's exactly what it is.

The epic story of the West is the development in the 19th century of a mass prosperity the world had never seen and its near-disappearance in one nation after another in the 20th.

The Tiffany lamp is an American icon bridging the immigrants, settlement houses, and the slums of the Lower East Side and the wealthy industrialists of upper Manhattan, the Gilded Age and its excesses.

We're trying to run a 21st century society and economy with 19th century Darwinian, competitive, crude ideas.

Here's an irony of the history of conservatism's relationship with business and business's relationship with conservatism: 'Wall Street' used to be the right-wing industrialists of the forties and fifties' greatest term of derision. (Wall Street was the place that humiliated them by forcing them, hat in hand, to beg for capital).

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of the country.

John D. Rockefeller is the greatest murderer the nation had ever produced.

If they [steel magnates] don't do well, I don't do well.

President Reagan told us from the beginning that he believed in a kind of Social Darwinism, survival of the fittest ... [that] we should settle for taking care of the strong, and hope that economic ambition and charity will do the rest. Make the rich richer, and what falls from the table will be enough for the middle class and those who are trying desperately to work their way into the middle class.

People who teach American history survey classes have a lot of ground to cover and tend to focus on landmarks. You get through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and you have to get to the beginning of the 20th century fast. It's pretty easy to go lightly on the Gilded Age.

Republicans controlled the federal government for decades after the Civil War, and their policies funneled wealth upward -- with dire consequences. In 1893, the economy crashed, and too few Americans had enough purchasing power to revive it. Lincoln had been right: Government that served the wealthy would ruin the country.

Late 19th-century America was basically a plutocratic enterprise while people toiled in mines and died of coal dust poisoning.

People like the robber barons assumed that the doctrine of the survival of the fittest authenticated them as deserving power. You know, "I'm the richest. Therefore, I'm the best. God's in his heaven, etc." And that reaction of the robber barons was so irritating to people that it made it unfashionable to think of an economy as an ecosystem. But the truth is that it is a lot like an ecosystem. And you get many of the same results.

The early industrialists were for the most part men who had their origin in the same social strata from which their workers came. They lived very modestly, spent only a fraction of their earnings for their households and put the rest back into the business.