While waiting in the doctor's office I found myself leafing through a copy of 'Newsweek' (boredom can make you do strange things). My eye eventually hooked on a column lamenting the loss of the ‘golden days’ of capitalism, when the economy was steered by benevolent patriarchs like the Rockefellers and Carnegies, whose far-sighted sagacity eased the plight of the masses and made enlightened business a vanguard of social progress.
It infuriated me.
The article not only missed the mark, but actually turned history on its head. Rockefeller was anything but a benevolent patriarch, or even an enlightened despot. During his tenure as head of Standard Oil he repeatedly uprooted competition by engaging in industrial sabotage and extralegal business dealings which would earn him prison time today – not the accolades of adoring columnists. When workers in Ludlow, Colorado demanded that Rockefeller comply with Colorado mining laws concerning work conditions and pay they were met with a typically novel response: the sound of a machine gun bullets scraping the night.
The weasel was too cowardly to even kill the workers and their families during the daytime.
Carnegie was not any better – maybe even worse. When his workers objected to working for pittance wages, unsafe work conditions, and a dismal life of poverty in company towns, he had no compunction against running roughshod over their grievances. What resulted were several massacres and pitched battles between him and his workers, all of which he won (it helps when you have a private militia equipped with machine guns at your disposal).
Rockefeller may have donated a portion of his earnings to charity – which was pocket-change in terms of his total assets – and Carnegie may have built a bunch of libraries, but when their workers were slaving in hellish conditions for 16 hours a day they hardly had time to make use of this “philanthropy”.
Maybe they gave away so much money towards the ends of their lives as an attempt at penance for their myriad sins. No matter how much you try, money cannot completely wipe away the stains of bloods-smeared hands.
That ‘Newsweek’ waxes over the ‘legacy’ of these criminals betrays a propaganda coup paralleled only by the continued cults of Lenin and Stalin. Yet it also reveals a more general tendency of pundits, journalists, and intellectuals to subscribe to cults of personality. It is all too common to find comfortable and, quite frankly, aloof opinion-makers entertaining an unfounded nostalgia for ‘movers of history’ who really amounted to little more than paper tigers – and venal ones at that.
Be skeptical of those who those who glorify the past or supposedly larger than life figures. Be especially skeptical if these figures happen to be businessmen who somehow managed to wear pin-stripe suits while their workers were wearing rags.
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