EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Entrepreneurial Leadership Among the “Robber Barons”: A Trial Balance

Chester McArthur Destler

The Journal of Economic History, 1946, vol. 6, issue S1, 28-49

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the semipiratical entrepreneurs who roamed the United States virtually unchecked before 1903, save for who the opposition of a few publicists and some short-lived vigilante committees. Contemporaries, following Henry Demarest Lloyd and Carl Schurz, likened businessmen of this type to the nobles who infested the Medieval Rhine. The term “robber barons” has stuck to them through the years despite occasional attempts at rehabilitating one or another who stood out above the throng by virtue of his accumulations or philanthropy. Only recently, for example, Howard Mumford Jones distinguished between the “cruelty” and the “culture” of these magnates whose behavior in the commercial-political and the artistic-literary fields he prefers to liken to the “commercial tyrants” of the Renaissance. No one to date, so far as I know, has attempted to distinguish from their strictly buccaneering activities the permanent contributions made by these businessmen as a group to American business practices. Such is the purpose of this paper.

Date: 1946
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:jechis:v:6:y:1946:i:s1:p:28-49_05

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The Journal of Economic History from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:cup:jechis:v:6:y:1946:i:s1:p:28-49_05